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A few thoughts on authorial intent, canonical plausibility, popular readings, and the extent to which speculation about Draco/Hermione can be said to derive from fanfic, rather than from the canon itself.
Please note that I am not going to be making any arguments either for or against Redeemable!Draco or Draco/Hermione in this message. In this post, I am just talking about where these notions come from in the more general sense, and about the relationship between their appearance in speculation and their appearance in fanfic.
I do hope to write a separate post dealing with Redeemable!Draco in the next day or two, but for reasons which I hope might be clear, I would like to separate that discussion somewhat from this one, which is more a question of general theory than of specific canonical argument.
You will, however, wait in vain to see a Draco/Hermione shipping post from me. This is because I only ship big important major characters, like Mrs. Norris, the lunch trolley witch, Avery, and Florence.
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So. First off, a few words about authorial intent.
A while back, Penny cited a number of past exchanges that have appeared on this list in regard to the fanfic/fanspec debate.
Now, one of my constant problems with these conversations is that they tend to start from the assumption that the author's intent is of supreme importance to the work itself, that it confers legitimacy on textual interpretation, that it is, in fact, the final authority on the work's true "meaning."
This is problematic for me on a number of different levels, but primarily because I believe that it is complete and utter rubbish.
My perspective on this has admittedly been quite strongly influenced by the fact that my academic background was in the field of classical literature: the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. "The Author Is Dead!" might be the battle-cry of certain movements within the field of literary criticism, but you know, I'm accustomed to dealing with authors who really are dead. I mean, these guys are so dead. They are so dead that you would not believe it. They aren't only merely dead, they're really most sincerely dead. Dead, dead, dead, as a Theory Bay post might put it. They're history. Their bones are dust, their temples have collapsed to ruins, and in the case of the Romans, even their language is dead.
And yet their works still retain meaning and importance to very many contemporary readers. The works themselves are very much alive.
So while as a classicist, one does indeed often try to reconstruct the cultural context as a means of determing the way in which the works might have been "meant" to be read at the time of their writing, to reconstruct that aspect of authorial intent, it is just such utter guess-work. We don't even know for certain how a Sophoclean drama would have been staged, for heaven's sake! It's all hypothesizing. And unlike many more modern authors, classical writers didn't leave behind much in the way of correspondence or memoirs describing their conscious intentions either. The temptation is therefore to adopt a critical approach which looks to the works themselves for meaning, while allowing the dust that was their authors' bones to rest in peace.
So that's my bias. All the same, I think that it is a valid approach to living authors as well. Certainly it has been a very popular one for...well, for nearly a hundred years now, actually.
I never got around to weighing in on Luke's Nel discussion questions from several weeks ago—the ones which centered around the issue of what makes a book a "classic"—but if I had, then I might have said this:
(1) A book may be said to be a "classic" only to the extent that it succeeds in transcending many aspects of its author's original intent.
If a literary work cannot outlive the specific cultural and historical context in which it was written, then it cannot possibly become a "classic," because it simply will not remain in circulation long enough to do so. To stand the test of time, a work must continue to affect readers strongly and deeply even once those readers are no longer rooted in the same time, place, or precise cultural context as the text's original author.
(2) A book may also be said to be a "classic" to the extent to which it supports multiple interpretations.
A literary work that cannot support more than one interpretation is not only likely to be shallow and uninteresting; it will also prove far too inflexible to stand the test of time.
In short:
Authors die, mores change, and Empires fall.
But really good books remain really good books.
Penny wrote (quoting one her own posts from some time back):
We all put our own spin on the characters. They're the same characters that JKR created. But, everyone looks at them in a different way.
Yup. We call that "reading." *g*
Penny also cited herself here:
Anyway, I'm completely opposed to the notion that there is only one JKR interpretation of these characters and books and I'm especially opposed to the notion that this one interpretation is discernible by people other than JKR herself.
I'd go Penny one step further here. See, even if there were a "One True JKR Interpretation," I don't see why on earth any of us should allow knowing it to influence our reading of her text. Authors are very rarely the best interpreters of their own works, nor are their interpretations necessarily any more valid than anyone else's. Indeed, authors are often notoriously oblivious to the true import of what they themselves have written.
The fanfic writers on the list will surely back me up here. I imagine that most of them have stories to tell about those times that their readers have commented on a powerful running motif, or a strong thematic implication in their work, and by doing so just astonished them, because they themselves had no conscious awareness of having put that in there at all. Everybody who has ever written fiction has had this happen to them. It's par for the course. It is also, in my experience, a large part of what makes the act of writing itself such a profound and personal endeavor.
So while the author can shed light on her original intent, and while this is indeed often very interesting, it does not, IMO, bear any relationship to the actual merit or value of any given reading of a literary work.
Penny wrote:
I still stand by my position that it is impossible to say that you are reading a work with authorial intent in mind, unless you've got firm unequivocal written evidence of authorial intent from the author.
I agree. But honestly, even if it were possible to have such unequivocal evidence, what difference would it make? Who cares how the author wants us to read her work?
As far as I'm concerned, as soon as a written work is distributed, then the question of how it is to be read is out of the author's hands. Authors may indeed own the right to their works in the legal sense, but they do not own the rights to the reader's interpretation of their works, and they certainly have no power to dictate the reader's emotional response to what they have written. That is the inalienable right of the reader.
Some people view this approach as hostile to the author. I do not consider it hostile to the author at all. I consider it respectful to the author.
You see, the author already had the chance to affect the reader's interpretation of the text. She got that chance when she was writing the thing in the first place. She got to choose her plot, and her characters, and her dialogue, and even the very words by which all of those things were conveyed.
We call that "writing," and that is the means by which writers go about dictating reader interpretation. Not through their interviews, and not through their authorized biographies. Through their writing.
To grant the author's stated intent as conveyed through, say, an interview a higher authority than the author's own text is actually very condescending to the author, in my opinion. It's disrespectful, because it implies that the author is so deeply incompetent that her actual writing cannot be trusted to convey any coherent or legitimate meaning on its own merits.
This is the reason that while I do find interviews with JKR interesting, and I do find them compelling evidence as support for various future speculations, I do not really consider them "canon." They are not canon. Canon is the text itself. Literary interviews and literary memoirs are often fascinating -- but they are not the same thing as literature.
Okay. So now that I've got that off my chest, let's look at the question of canonical plausibility, shall we?
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Back in early February, I posted a two-part essay about how readers go about evaluating canonical plausibility. Interestingly enough, I used poor old Redeemable!Draco himself as my primary illustrative example of the ways in which different readers might approach the question of how "plausible" a given speculation is. I do feel a bit embarrassed about asking people to go back and read my own old post like this, but as the only alternative would be for me to write it out all over again, I'm going to grit my teeth and do it anyway, and just hope that people won't think it too hideously Lockhartish of me.
The relevant links here are:
The first part is more relevant than the second, which returns at the end to a long running argument that I was having at the time about Snape and his old Slytherin buddies; I include it here, though, because it also contains my attempt to define my use of the term "reader subversion," which seems to have caused no small degree of dismay on the list over the past couple of days.
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Now, on to my own take on the canonical "legitimacy" of the D/H ship.
First off, I don't want to get too deeply into the canonical arguments for or against D/H in this post. For one thing, it's really not my favorite topic. For another, I'd like to try to focus on the theory itself here, rather than getting all caught up in the specifics.
Just for the record, though, I will say that while I myself do not consider D/H to be very plausible at all, I don't consider it a "subversive" (ie, only possible as a consciously revisionist reinterpretation of the text) reading either. I think that it does indeed have some canonical suggestion, although I also agree with Jo in believing that the overall weight of canonical evidence militates against it.
I would like, however, to point out that the very fact that D/H is such a very popular fanfic convention is compelling evidence to my mind that it is also a reading of the text that many people have found to be instinctive. Fanfic tropes don't come out of thin air. Occasionally they may develop purely within the fandom (the notion that Lupin lives in North Wales, for example, is AFAIK a "pure" example of "fanon"), but far more often, they derive from popular interpretations of the original text. This is the reason that one tends to find exactly the same concepts appearing over and over again both in fanfic and on discussion boards like this one, even among people who do not, er, swim in both seas. So to speak.
Redeemed!Draco is both a popular fanfic protagonist and a popular focus of reader speculation because both of these phenomena derive from precisely the same source.
That source, of course, is the canon.
Jo wrote, in explanation of her assumption that Heidi's defense of the D/H ship must have derived from fanfic, rather than from the canon itself:
I was thinking that it was certainly unlikely that many readers (of canon), would consider this a plausable possibility, without having been influenced by any of a number of fanfics where both Draco and Hermione have had their personalities altered in a way that would make this possible.
Mmmmm.
Well, you know, I work in a bookstore. And while I'm at work I often find myself eavesdropping on kids discussing the Potter books. I do this because the question of how children read these books interests me, and as I have neither children of my own nor very much exposure to (or experience with) them, this is one of my few ways of finding out how the, er, target audience ::nervous glance at Penny:: is actually interpreting the text.
And you know what? Adolescent boys 'ship. They do, they really do. It's just a riot. It cracks me up. They sit around in our coffee shop eating cookies and engaging in romantic speculation all the time. It's just like they're talking about a soap opera or something. It's hysterical.
And you know what adolescent boys like to talk about?
Draco/Hermione.
As far as I can tell, this is primarily because nearly all of them take it as read that Draco's got this massive crush on Hermione, and they're all quite naturally curious as to whether there is any chance at all that this crush could ever come to be reciprocated in canon. (For what it's worth, most of them seem to be hoping that it won't be.)
This notion that Draco likes Hermione isn't even discussed among them as if it's some wild and out-there speculation. They're not even bothering to debate that. They're just assuming it. To boys of around the same age as the books' protagonists, the notion that Draco has a crush on Hermione—and that he has had since PoA, if not before—seems to be a completely instinctive and unself-conscious reading of the text.
This really surprised me when I noticed it. But then I went back and checked out the relevant scenes, this time keeping in mind that Draco Malfoy is not an adult, nor even an older teen, but instead a rather immature and disturbed adolescent boy, and um...
Well, yeah. I have to say it: I've come around to thinking that Draco's got a crush on Hermione too. I don't think that she reciprocates it at all, mind. But I do think that it's there.
Of course, though, this all comes down to interpretation of character, which is always highly subjective, even more so than many other types of textual analysis. (This is, I believe, the main reason that shipping debates at times seem so much more unresolvable than other types of canonical discussion.) Every single bit of text that I interpret as evidence a crush, you might with equal validity interpret as evidence of Draco's disdain, dismissal, or even outright hatred of Hermione. Which of these readings the author actually intends is unknown, and furthermore, to my mind, it doesn't really matter all that much. The fact of the matter is that the text itself both can and does support both readings -- and that for whatever reason or set of reasons, the "crush" reading seems to be a very instinctive one for the series' adolescent male readership.
Now, somehow I doubt that all of those twelve year old boys are reading a whole lot of fanfic. I think that they're probably just reading the books.
Much like so many of the authors of D/H fanfics were doing, when they came up with the idea of writing fics about it in the first place.
Popular readings don't just come out of nowhere. They are not spontaneously generated. If a particular interpretation proves popular with a wide range of readers, then you can bet that there is something, either in the text itself or in the way in which the text interacts with contemporary mores and beliefs, that is leading all of those people to read it in the same way.
I'm not an H/D shipper myself, but I don't think that the concept is wholly unsupported by canon, nor do I think that it has developed as a pure expression of "fanon." I am certain that many readers first had the possibility of a future canonical Draco/Hermione ship drawn to their attention by fanfic. But I am equally certain that plenty of readers came to it of their own accord, due to factors like the Jane Austen parallel that Heidi has mentioned, the fact that Draco so rarely speaks directly to Hermione at all, the tone of his dialogue when he does address her (particularly in _GoF_), the tenor of his "warning" gloat at the QWC, their own real-life experience of how immature adolescent boys often behave around girls that they like, the suspicion that JKR might have a redemption scenario in mind for Draco, and so forth. In fact, I strongly suspect that these canonical suggestions were precisely what led to D/H's establishment as such a popular fanfic theme in the first place.
If JKR really didn't want for quite so many people to read her Draco as a possibly redeemable character, or to see the possibility of a future D/H ship embedded in the text, then IMO she ought to have made a number of her authorial choices somewhat differently. As things stand, she has indeed written a text which encourages quite a lot of people to independently adopt such interpretations.
If there is a disease here (which I personally don't think that there is, but which some people apparently do), then I don't think that fanfic is its cause at all.
Fanfic is but one of its many symptoms.
—Elkins
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on May 24, 2002 1:59 PM
1 comment (link leads to main site)
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