…well, for me at least; everyone stay and have another round on me. I had originally planned to finish up my time guest blogging with a post on Neville and masculinity. Unfortunately, with the semester in full swing and a publication deadline looming over me in a very Umbridge-like manner, I need to pay my tab and get back to the Muggle world. Before I go I wanted to say thanks and leave you all with some ideas to mull over.
First, a big thanks to Travis for letting me blog in the first place. Have you all heard about his books? They’re awesome and available on Amazon (and my essay on Ginny is in one!). Just a thought.
And most importantly, a HUGE thank you to everyone at the pub who read, commented, and shared their thoughts. Even if you just lurked and watched the, er, lively debates that ensued, it’s much appreciated.
I’ve learned a lot from this experience, and I hope others have as well. The greatest aspect of Harry Potter fandom, for me, is the diversity of people who can connect because of this shared text. So often we stick to our circumscribed group of friends, who all share similar viewpoints, and don’t interact with people outside our circle. Here we come together from disparate backgrounds to share our thoughts on what we all enjoy. While we don’t always agree with one another, we listen and we respect each other’s differences because of what Harry has taught us about love.
One lesson I hope everyone can take away is that we shouldn’t simply accept things at face value or because they’re part of the status quo (because the status is not quo. Dr. Horrible, anyone?…anyone?). Readers should always question the texts they’re presented with. There is no ONE TRUE MEANING of a book, film, etc. As my favorite English teacher said, “if you can back it up with quotes from the text, your interpretation can’t be wrong.” While that statement is very simplified, I think the essence of it should be taken to heart.
My goal while here was never to “convert” people to feminism; I don’t believe in proselytizing. Rather, I wanted to present a different way of reading the text, through the lens of gender studies. It would be silly (and hypocritical) of me to say everyone has to agree with me. My hope is that the next time you pick up Harry Potter (or any other book), perhaps you look to Hermione, Luna, even Ginny and question why they behave a certain way and what that says to a worldwide readership about girls.
If you want to add any thoughts about Neville in comments please feel free. I’ll see you around the pub, unless Dung lets me borrow his veil (though it probably smells), or you can find me on facebook. Cheers!
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
When you say that there is no one true meaning of any book (or film, or work of art), are you talking about the understanding of the author’s intent, or are you going beyond the text to what the content could mean in the larger context, i.e. the context in which the author is writing (and the reader reading)? You could tentatively call the two ways of interpretation staying within the smaller context, as compared to going beyond it into the larger context.
The way I’ve phrased the question sounds very convoluted, so let me give an example to make my meaning plainer: in Chapter 8, Bill and Fleur are married. Smaller context interpretations could be that this is the last moment of normalcy before the beginning of the war, or that it’s the temporary triumph of good over evil, or the line of analysis I took in my post, that this is the moment fully realizes how little he knew or understood Dumbledore. Larger context interpretations could be how the wizard world, so different from the world of Muggles that the concept of a telephone is alien to them, still seems to find so natural the rituals of a traditional Anglo-Saxon wedding, down to the words in the service. Or the author’s seemingly unquestioned assumption that both Ron and Harry feel it’s right and appropriate that Ron could extract and Harry honour “the promise he’d given to Ron” about not “groping” Ginny every chance he gets.
When you say readers should question the texts they’re presented with, are you referring to what I’ve called the larger vs the smaller context?
Great question, Red Rocker.
To continue with your terminology, I think readers should question within both small and large contexts. As you’ve illustrated quite well in your comment, one can “read” part of a plot in a variety of ways. One person, upon finishing chapter 8, might say the wedding demonstrates the calm before the storm of the fall of the Ministry. Another reader may say the wedding illustrates the alchemical wedding, what with all the gold everywhere and, of course, an actual wedding. Yet another may read the scene and think about the history of Anglican wedding ceremonies. And yet another may see the reproduction of the patriarchal tradition of fathers giving away their daughters to husbands as if she were property. All of that is in there, and no one reader is more right than another, nor is any one wrong.
And all these interpretations start with a basic question: “What does it mean?” or “Why?”
I might be beating a dead hippogriff here, but I don’t follow authorial intent. Sure, an author has intentions when she writes, and she assigns meaning to her text, but that’s not the only meaning. And really, what’s the big deal if she “meant” something or not? If it’s in the text it’s up for debate.
That hippogriff is not dead. At least, not to me.
Seems to me – untutored as I am in literary criticism – that what the author intends to convey has to be the main focus in our understanding and interpretation of the story. Not saying that other types of interpretations are not possible or permissable or uninteresting. They might even be more interesting than the analysis of what the author “intends” to say. Case in point: the Twilight books. But I think that our primary task should be getting at the meaning the author tries to put in the story: what techniques she uses, where she succeeds, where she fails, why she succeeds, how that compares to how others have approached similar themes and stories, and so on. This is based on my gut feeling that we need to look at the work on its own terms first, as a stand alone piece of art, separate from both artist and culture, before we look at it as a product of the artist and the culture. I can anticipate the argument that you can’t separate the work from its culture – but that’s not my point. My point is that the
author is trying to create her own miniature reality or version of the larger world, and we owe her the courtesy of trying to understand what she’s trying to say about the larger world – and how well she succeeds – before we turn to how the larger world affected the smaller one.
But questions such as which type of criticism is more important, or which should come first, are actually sec0ndary to my real point, which is that the two types of analysis or intepretation are essentially different. And I would argue that although correctness would be hard to determine with either type of analysis, it might be more fruitful with with the first type of analysis – of trying to understand the author’s intent and how well she delivers.
Late night meanderings, I know. But something in me really resists the idea that all intepretations are equally viable.
Red Rocker, I absolutely agree with you!
Thanks Gwen for you posts.
Your posts generated some lively discussion.
I wish this post had been your pre-amble rather than the post script. It would have helped me interpret your posts and comments.
Excellent comment, Red Rocker.
what the author intends to convey has to be the main focus in our understanding and interpretation of the story
That’s one way to understand a story, but to play devil’s advocate here, how do you know what an author’s intention is? It’s slightly easier with Rowling because she’s alive and has talked a lot about her meaning, but what about, say, Shakespeare? or Chaucer? How can we know what they intended to mean, and how do we distinguish that from what meaning(s) readers and critics have come up with in the centuries since they wrote? And what if a living author, in giving an interview on her work, completely makes something up when asked about her meaning? (I’ve thought that, if I ever wrote fiction and people read it, I would b.s. about my intentions to spice things up. “Oh, no, the part where they fall in love is an obvious allegory of the Protestant Reformation” or some such nonsense). Finally, how does an author even know what was intentional on her part and what was unintentional? If an author can’t distinguish between the two, how can a reader? In some comments people have written that JKR couldn’t have intended for Ginny’s relationship with Harry to limit her development (if they agree with that hypothesis), but how does anyone really know that? Sure, we all hope that she didn’t intend it, but there’s no certainty.
it might be more fruitful with with the first type of analysis – of trying to understand the author’s intent and how well she delivers
RR, how would you define a fruitful analysis, and when do you know you’ve achieved it?
To my mind, and correct if I’m wrong because I’m making a gross generalization about readers I know and not you specifically, most Intentionalist or New Critics prefer to understand a work based on author’s intentions because it’s more “knowable,” in a sense. If one figures out the intention one can figure out the text and thus get The Answer. As students we have it hammered into us that the “point” is to get the answer, which of course assumes that there is one. I’m all about multiplicity and not knowing. Sure, I have my interpretation, but that’s not the end all be all; it’s not the answer. Someone could come along with a new interpretation and completely change my point of view. For many in the Ivory Tower this is impossible, because they already have the answer, and thus don’t pay any heed to another viewpoint. Where’s the fun in that? If I had to define a fruitful analysis, first I’d make it plural, and then I’d say that involves a multiplicity of perspectives.
Gwen, you remind me of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, which was 42. Meaning that the answer about what is the author’s intent, or The Answer as you put it, could be totally arbitrary.
But I have to go now. I’ll try to work out a coherent response when I get back.
Gwen, thanks for coming and posting! I’m rather sorry to miss your thoughts on Neville and masculinity, as most of my experience with feminist thought has been hearing about females and female sexuality; other than comments about sexism, I haven’t heard much from feminism about the human male.
I would tend to agree with Red Rocker on the primary value of author’s intent in interpretation. But I don’t think that means interpretation, especially of a story, can be primarily reduced to a pat-answer thing (and I don’t think RR is saying that either).
Gwen, I add my thanks, too. I like my assumptions challenged and thinking provoked with differing views. Such debate helps open my mind to either solidify or reconsider my interpretations of a work.
Thank you for your postings & conversations, Gwen.
I will hope to hear about Neville and masculinity at a later date, Gwen.
You made me re-evaluate Ginny, whom I had not particularly cared about as a character – so thanks!
Gwen, Yes! Thank you for all you’ve written. Reading your thoughts on Ginny and Hermione both here and in HHC have been fascinating, wonderful, and challenging.
It should come as no surprise to anyone here that Gwen and I see completely eye-to-eye with respect to interpretive freedom and authorial intent. Red, I think your method of trying to see books as communications between authors and readers is a valid point of departure, if one whose methodology is difficult to describe or ascertain. As Gwen said, the thoughts of many modern authors surface all over the place, unless they’re someone like Thomas Pynchon. Rowling, especially, sometimes seems to be unable to let the books speak for themselves.
But, as Gwen has asked, if you can find examples in the text, how do you discern any one thread, theme, or characterization as having primacy over others? Sometimes it seems obvious. Rowling clearly knew what she was doing with respect to the alchemical scaffolding, and she clearly wants her readers to see it. But there is no way at all in which she can anticipate how/when her readers will catch it, what they will do with it, or whether it will even matter.
Written texts (or any media, really) do not simply exist as objects codified and indexed within some material boundary, like a dust jacket. To borrow from and extend Roland Barthes argument that the “author is dead,” mediated information shoots across media channels to become experiences situated within multiple simultaneous contexts — often encountered and understood in surprisingly complex ways. No media experience can be removed from these contexts. Authors write in response to the contexts that surround them. Audiences consume a text within the contexts that surround them. At a social constructivist level, there is no way at all to separate any media from the context in which it is consumed, but many texts can slowly drift from the contexts in which they were created due to historical, cultural, and material forces. Armies can conquer and redesign a fable to benefit their own political agenda. Cultures can adapt to and from new technologies, rewriting (or reinterpreting) their social narratives for all kinds of reasons. And modes of production and distribution can completely change audience’s experience with the text.
Gwen has raised some interesting questions. One of them, how do we know what the author’s intention is, is the one that intrigues me, so I’ll tackle that one. I’ll also try to tackle Dave’s question about the method whereby we can know that intent.
I think that at a certain level, it can be pretty difficult – maybe impossible – to know what the author’s intent was. We can’t read minds. We can’t go by what the author says – she might be lying, or she might not know herself. And the intent could have changed over time, evolved, or gotten side tracked. For example, many of us here are pretty sure JKR never intended Snape to take over so much of the emotional weight of the story. She herself disputes – tongue firmly in cheek – that Snape could be considered in a heroic light: why do people like him so much, she argues in exasperation.
But once the words are written and the story is told, there it stands, separate from the author and her intentions and hopes and wishes. The author can still offer her interpretations, but unless she does a re-write, the work is pretty impervious to external influence. I know Dave for one would dispute this. I would argue myself that how we see the work changes with prevailing trends and opinions. And we can’t but see the words through our own perspective. But the words themselves, their order, the underlying structure, the order of events – the content – will not change.
I would like to try to make the argument that the meaning of a book resides mostly within that unchanging content. By meaning I mean what the author tried to convey to the reader. And that by examining the content, we can try to get at that meaning. Unlike the author, the words themselves can not lie.
But can we decipher them?
One of the biggest challenges in trying to understand what the author meant is to somehow eliminate our own perspective. Which is impossible. But if we can’t do away with our perspective, can be transcend it? I don’t want to go all George MacDonald here, especially since I don’t understand him very well, but it seems to me that great books are great because they do echo the great constants of humanity. And I think we are capable of detecting those constants. Something in us responds to their presence; and the better the writing, the stronger our response. So I can say with some certainty that an important theme of Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities is the triumph of the power of love and sacrifice over hatred and evil. Sydney Carton and Lucie Manette and Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross on the one hand, the Evremondes and the Defarges on the other. I’d also add for good measure the theme that injustice breeds injustice and great injustice breeds great injustice.
I can hear the question already: “But how do you know that’s what Dickens intended to say? How can you be sure?” Well, I would never claim to know The Answer to any question, but I’d be prepared to say that Dickens gives us a lot of clues to allow us to reach these conclusion – some would say he beats us over the head to make us reach these conclusions – and I will list them if you wish, but the burden of the evidence – the content if you wish – supports these conclusions. It’s a statistical argument, actually, but backed by those universal themes resonating down through the centuries.
Not all writers are Dickens – I picked him because his moral lessons are so clear. But all writers are trying so say something. A lot of the time their messages are mixed, unclear, fragmented, partial, contradictory. Sometimes all we can do is generate some hypotheses, and try to decide what the likely ones are. And it is at this point I can hear Gwen: why not entertain all the hypotheses, if there is evidence for all of them? Well, sure. But for me, that means that the author was not very successful in conveying her meaning. And I do believe that’s the norm rather than the exception. But I don’t believe that we should therefore throw out the baby with the bathwater and stop trying to understand what the author meant to the best of her ability, to the best of our ability.
Just when I think I can concentrate on my writing you all pull me back in with your intriguing ideas and requests to talk about Neville.
I will resist for a while longer (er, Friday?) and respond to the points RR et al. have brought up. And give a little hint about my thoughts on Neville & masculinity perhaps.
Otherwise, thanks all for reading and for commenting. Hearing that I’ve made people think is the greatest compliment I could receive as a teacher.