The Gryffindor Gazette

Did outing Dumbledore limit our view of the fictional world of Harry Potter?

by Wendy on October 24th, 2007

In an article from the Dallas Morning News, the writer manages to put succinctly what I’ve been vainly trying to express. Here we go:

If you didn’t put it in the books, please don’t tell us now.

I guess I don’t want you to stop explaining completely. I’d love to know more about what inspired some of the plot details in the books. If you want to dish about how you decided on those particular inscriptions for the headstones, how you came up with the names for the characters, or how you cleverly planned the religious underpinnings of the broad arc of the story – I am all ears.

But telling us that Dumbledore is gay, as you did last week? Why would you do that?

As a fan, I can understand both the authorial impulse and the public interest. As a reader, it’s making me nuts.

Another awfully good British author, the late Douglas Adams of the successful Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series, confronted a comparable question a few years back. One of his fans asked about the kind of computer one of his characters used. He replied, in part:
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“The book is a work of fiction. It’s a sequence of words arranged to unfold a story in a reader’s mind. There is no such actual, real person as Arthur Dent. He has no existence outside the sequence of words designed to create an idea of this imaginary person in people’s minds. There is no objective real world I am describing, or which I can enter, and pick up his computer, look at it and tell you what model it is, or turn it over and read off its serial number for you. It doesn’t exist.”

I’d disagree with that a bit. It does exist – in the minds of any reader who wants it to exist. And that’s what you’re interfering with.

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger long ago came up with a wonderful thought experiment. He imagined a cat that existed across possibilities – somehow simultaneously alive and dead until somebody checked to see which was true.

What seems weird (but true) in physics is just the way it has always been with a good story. What exactly did Huck Finn’s raft look like? Did Captain Ahab’s father whip him every St. Swithin’s Day? Did Bilbo Baggins use product on his hair back in the Shire?

As a reader, I get to decide, because the author left those details untold in the books. Which is one reason that a book is almost always better than the movie based on it. More explicit backstory is not always better. Compare the brilliant book (and cartoon) of How the Grinch Stole Christmas with the awful live-action movie. The Grinch had an unhappy childhood? Who cares?

Based on what you decided to put in the books, I can imagine that Dumbledore once had a girlfriend or that he was so emotionally crushed by guilt that he sealed himself off from romance or that he was one of those rare men for whom romance never really came up – or that he was gay.

I can consider any of those possibilities as I read – or I can mull over all of them at the same time. Talk about magic.

Is Dumbledore gay? He is for you, apparently. But unless you said it in the actual books, must he be so for me? Your saying so now makes it harder for me to imagine anything different. Do you really want to limit your fictional world that way?

Jo – can I call you Jo? Like all of your myriad fans, I’ve spent so much time exploring the children of your mind over this past decade that I feel we are friends.

You lived with Harry, his friends and his foes for so many years. You birthed them, shaped them, honed the fine details of their existence. And you thought long and hard about exactly which of those details were so important to the story that you would include them in the books.

For all of those years, until those books were published, the characters and settings were yours to command and control. But then you let them go.

And speaking for all of your happy readers I need to tell you: Now they are ours.

YES! This is why I am not really that happy about JK Rowling’s revelations. I want to imagine the characters of Harry Potter in my own way, in my own time. Fan fiction is a fun way to explore the myriad possibilities, but at this point, the stories are out of JK Rowling’s hands. She must let them go and let the readers decide what happens to the characters from this point onwards.

At least, that’s just my humble opinion. What do you think?

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