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I'd like to jump into this thread [said Porphyria who will probably prove to be more un-subversive than will amuse Elkins ;-)]
Oh, I shouldn't worry about that, Porphyria. I'm easily amused. ;-)
For starters, I'm interested in summing up a few areas of potential reader unrest in the HP series to see if anyone else would like to discuss them.
Cool! Let's see, now.
3. Frustrations of being an adult reading a series which is designed to be suitable for a child or young adult audience (i.e. certain issues like teen pregnancy or drugs seemingly will never be addressed; sex gets glossed over)
Hmmm. I can't say that this one has bothered me much (not yet, at any rate). I was fairly impressed, in fact, with the way that in the last book, JKR managed to suggest some rather adult nastiness without actually straying from the PG path. The harrassment of Mrs. Roberts at the Quiddich World Cup, for example, certainly suggests muggle-rape as a popular DE pasttime to adult readers; to a child I expect it would have had far stronger associations with the playground obsession with seeing people's underwear. (Not, of course, that the two phenomena are completely unrelated, which is part of what made it such a very clever gloss, IMO.)
5. Inconsistencies of genre: the series combines elements of fantasy/fairy tale (in which one typically finds archtypical roles with distinct functions) with that of the mystery (where characters are often not what they seem and break type), plus other genres as well: boarding school, coming-of-age, and certainly satire. Do these genres combine in a satisfactory way or are they often at cross-purposes?
Now this is a really interesting one, because I think that my answer would have to be: "Both." The 'genre-soup' aspect of the books is certainly one of the things that I find most appealing about them, and I doubt that I'm alone in that: I suspect that it may well be one of the things that accounts for the series' enormous popularity. At the same time, though, the genres that JKR is combining do often work at cross-purposes, and I think that this can definitely be...anxiety-provoking.
Take that infamous Gleam In Dumbledore's Eye, for example. That gleam does seem to have caused some people a great deal of consternation, and I think that the genre-medley is largely to blame for that. If this were merely a fantasy/fairy tale, then the Gleam would be far less of an issue: a gleam in the twinkling blue eyes of the Old Wise Wizarding Mentor can mean nothing but good news in such a story. In a series which owes so much to the mystery genre, on the other hand—a genre in which People Are Not Always What They Seem—the Gleam really seemed to frighten some readers. Could Dumbledore Be Up To No Good? What if the gleam is there because Dumbledore has just realized that Harry's death might now serve to banish Voldemort permanently—and he's just thrilled about it? Could Dumbledore actually be a Machiavellian manipulator, driving poor Harry relentlessly onward to his doom with all of the consideration and compassion of a farmer whipping on a reluctant ox?
Heh. Anxiety, yes. And in this particular case, a type of anxiety that I am almost certain was not at all what the author had intended to inspire, one that I don't really know if I think is terribly beneficial, overall.
In some cases, though, I think that the anxiety provoked by the genre-mixing is tremendously beneficial to the books. PoA, for example, was such an engaging read in part, I thought, because it had all of these tremendously powerful mytho-poetic archetypes running all the way through it, and yet at the same time was so firmly rooted in the mundane details of the boarding school story, and also at the same time had strong aspects of an Agatha Christie-like mystery novel...it was a page-turner in part because you just couldn't be certain how all of these genres were going to interact. It wasn't just a matter of wondering what would happen next, or what was really going on in the plot; there was also a kind of metatextual mystery in play—"Which genre conventions will take precedence here?"—that really made the book (for me, at any rate) impossible to put down.
Anxiety there, too, certainly. But a really really good kind of anxiety.
Does anyone have any issues with the writing style?
::wince::
Er...do I get lynched around here if I say that I do sometimes have some problems with the writing style?
What can I say? I think that Rowling's an excellent story-teller. Her prose style, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. All IMO, of course. Obviously I read the books with enjoyment, so it can't be all that big a problem for me.
Where it does become a problem for me, though, are the few places where I find myself running into a conflict between how the writing itself led me to visualize a scene while reading, and how I feel almost certain the author meant for me to visualize the scene.
Rowling's fondness for the verb "to shriek" is a good example of this one. My God, does she love that verb! She uses it every chance she gets. Whenever people raise their voices in the Potterverse, they are almost always "shrieking." (The Shrieking Shack has always amused me for this very reason. Of course it would be called "the Shrieking Shack!")
Now, to my mind a "shriek" is a very specific type of high-pitched raised voice. The verb has an entire body of implications and associations connected to it as a matter of connotation, and JKR's "shrieks" don't always seem to quite match up with these. (And no, I don't think that this is a matter of British vs American English. I read many English books, and I have never run into this difficulty with anybody else.) Sometimes it's almost as if I have to remind myself while reading: "Now, remember, Elkins: this is one of Rowling's 'shrieks.' So you mustn't necessarily assume that it's really a shriek."
And that can be...jarring, yes. Jarring and potentially problematic. I say "potentially," of course, because I've actually consciously noticed the Shriek Problem, and so it doesn't have quite as much power to lead me astray as it might otherwise have done (my insistence on reading Avery as a pathological hysteric rather than as a grovelling toady aside...)
But what about JKR's idiosyncracies that I haven't consciously noticed yet? Are they leading me into erroneous assumptions as a reader?
"Being Driven Right To The Brink of Sanity Draco" is another example of this. I have a strangely divided mind when it comes to those scenes which illustrate The Very Worst Of Draco Malfoy. The two that leap to mind are these:
The very end of Chapter Eight, CoS:
Then someone shouted through the quiet.
'Enemies of the heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudbloods!'
It was Draco Malfoy. He had pushed to the front of the crowd, his cold eyes alive, his unusally bloodless face flushed, as he grinned at the sight of the hanging, immobile cat.
(It's rather amazing, actually, that she didn't have him 'shrieking' there. Draco often shrieks.)
And then this, towards the end of Chapter Thirty-seven, GoF:
'So,' said Malfoy slowly, advancing slightly into the compartment and looking slowly around at them, a smirk quivering on his lips.
[Draco's horrific "I tried to warn you" speech follows shortly thereafter]
Now, I'm almost certain that I'm supposed to read both of these scenes as a Just Plain Mean kid being spectacularly horrid. And yet, my instinctive reading of Draco as he is described in both of those scenes is "stressed." In the CoS passage he looks half-crazed to me and not (as I suspect was the intended impression) with sadistic enjoyment, either. He looks febrile, like someone who is being pushed to the very limits of his own sanity. And similarly, in the GoF passage, that single word, "quivering," acts to undermine completely for me the impression that I suspect JKR was actually trying to convey.
And this is a problem. It's a problem because it creates a strange layering effect in my mind: there is the scene as I originally visualized it based on JKR's own writing, and then there is the "revised edition" based on what I believe to have been the true authorial intent. But the first impression can never be banished utterly: it remains, as a kind of ghostly shadow-image superimposed over my entire reading of the books—almost like that reflection of myself that is always faintly visible when I look out of the window here in dark-and-cloudy Portland, Oregon—so that, for example, I can never completely banish my mental image of Draco Malfoy as a deeply-divided character...even though I do not for a moment believe that he is supposed to be read as one.
And while to some extent this may be a matter of my own idiosyncratic reading practice, it is also a writing problem. Did JKR really stick the word "quivering" in that sentence to leave us with the impression that Draco is under emotional stress -- and thus to cast some doubt in our minds that he really means what he is saying? That's certainly the effect that it has, but was that its intended effect? And if she didn't want to convey that impression, then why in God's name did she put that word "quivering" there in the first place? Didn't she know the effect that would have on the reader?
Does the writer know what she's doing, or doesn't she?
If JKR were a better craftsman overall, then I would feel more confident in accepting my first readings as intent. Because I don't quite trust her technical abilities, however, I often find myself revising—"Shrieked" there doesn't really mean shrieked, it just means that he raised his voice," "No, that isn't really stress, that's sadistic pleasure; it just looks feverish because JKR got a little overexcited with her depiction," "That the smirk is 'quivering' probably doesn't really mean anything at all," etc)—and that is an anxiety-provoker -- and one that can lead quickly into subversion.
I'm interested in your assertion that all speculation (and fanfic) is inherently subversive.... If I understand you correctly, this subversion is independent of the content of the individual reader's content; one does not necessarily have to offer a controversial reading in order to effect this type of subversion.
Well, there are levels of subversion. ;-)
I do think that it is inherently subversive in that it is a kind of usurpation of authorial power. To speculate about future plot events, for example, is to assume, if only temporarily, the role of the Author. It is not necessarily a statement of authorial "superiority"—one can speculate without ever implying, for example, that one could do a better job of writing the story than the original author could—but it can very readily pave the way to that line of thinking.
To speculate about a future plot development in a serial, for example, involves first contemplating the possible options, and then choosing one over all of the others for reasons of plausibility, enjoyability, complexity, consistency, and so forth. Should the next installment of the serial reveal that the work's true author chose one of the options that the fan had already considered but rejected, then that can certainly lead to feelings of authorial superiority ("My idea was so much better. Why aren't I the one writing these things?"). It can also lead to a more generalized sense of disappointment and unrest, a loss of trust in the author. ("Of all the possible directions she could have taken that plotline, why did she choose that option? I mean, of all the stupid and simplistic ways to go with that...")
Even when speculation does not lead to these sorts of disappointments, though, I think that it is still inherently subversive in that it encourages a different relationship with the text than the usual one which exists between a reader and a completed work. It produces a dynamic in which the reader is empowered to make statements as the author ("I favor this theory because it is the one most in keeping with JKR's work to date..."), statements which even if they are not in the least bit controversial, may well prove to be false. Speculation sets up a kind of competition between Author and Reader which texts which do not encourage speculation do not foster in quite the same way.
Furthermore, I'd like to ask if all speculation and fanfic must be predicated on frustrations with the text. Is there such a case where a fan simply becomes so enamored with the fictional world here the 'Potterverse') or with some of its characters that they simply wish to become more of an active participant?
One good example of this type of active participation, I think, is self-insertion. Fan readings tend to be characterized by a high degree of self-insertion: the "fannish" reader likes to imagine herself entering the fictive world as neither reader nor as author, nor even precisely as character, but instead as reader-as-character. Fans enjoy perceiving the fictional world as one that has an independent existence outside of the text; imagining oneself actually entering this world is the next logical step.
Leaving aside the issue of how this often manifests itself in fanfic (because this isn't a fanfic board, and so I'd rather not get caught up in a discussion of Marysueism here), you see a lot of self-insertion in speculative discussions too, as well as in plain old HP fan chatter. ("What House do you think you'd be sorted into?" "If you could go to Hogwarts for one hour, where would you go?" "What sort of magic would you be best at, do you think?" "Who would you hate more as a teacher: Hagrid, or Snape?" "Which characters would you actually like as people in real life?")
This is active participation that is not really based on frustration at all. It's based in a desire to immerse oneself even more deeply in the fictive world. It can often lead to frustration, though, because in order to imagine oneself actually in the world, one needs information about its details that the author has not provided. I think that a lot of the speculation and discussion we see here about the logistical details of the Potterverse, or about aspects of the world that fall outside of the scope of the books themselves, is characterized by a bit of frustration, even if frustration with the text was not the original impetus for wondering about these things in the first place. If that makes sense.
"Can devout students even really attend Hogwarts?" might be a good example of this one—or, for that matter, "Where are all the Bleeding Hearts of the Wizarding World?" ;-) The questions, and the speculation they encourage, are symptomatic of a certain degree of frustration with the text. But in many cases they derive from self-insertion—"How would I myself (as a devoutly religious person, or as a political leftist, or as a lawyer by profession, or as a lesbian, or as a superb student who would want to go on to higher education) fit into this world? Where would my place be? What would my social role be? How would I have to adapt myself, if this were the world that I inhabited?" Self-insertion is the sign of an enamored reader, not a frustrated one. But self-insertion quickly leads to frustration with the text.
Uh...so in short, being enamored can lead quickly to frustration.
Riiiiight. Like we didn't already know that.
Or does all emotional involvement require some sort of frustration? If not then authorial envy (wanting to write it yourself) and anxiety with the text (and its consequent tendency to produce readings against the grain) would be two separate forms of subversion.
I think that in practice, the one almost invariably leads into the other.
Here I'd like to add that the HP series itself actively and consciously encourages speculation due to the way that it's written.
I think that this is an excellent point! And JKR seems to take quite a bit of pleasure in teasing her fans about this aspect of the work as well, in interviews and such. She may not have known she was doing this when she first started writing the series, but she's certainly doing it quite consciously now.
Snapestuff to follow.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on February 12, 2002 6:01 PM
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