" [...] an author and her book will always be playing"
(With thanks to A.A. Milne)
I've always been fascinated by Rowling's interviews. As long as the series was still being written they were fun for a bit of innocent sluething; and now that the series is over it's nice to savor a long goodbye at the top of a fictional forest halfway between Hogwarts and a television studio in New York.
Which leads to some puzzlement about the relationship between authors and their (finished) books. People like Umberto Eco insist that authors' opinions about their works are irrelevant - which has always seemed a extreme. To my surprise, our own fellow listie Phillip Pullman has made similar assertions about his own books.
So, as I was listening to one Rowling's recent US interviews (btw, I'd would recommend watching her in action - she's very good!) I found myself wondering: What is she doing, anyway?
The story is over - fertig, finito. She's given Harry his pack and his penny and sent him off to seek his destiny. Of course, when she throws out tidbits about his future career as an auror - well, it looks a bit flat in print, but when I see her in action doing an interview, I get that same tell-me-a-story feeling my children get when my wife launches out into another episode of the adventures of a little gnome named Epinard (Spinach). Of course it's silly - but I'll take all the story I can get.
On the other hand, when she tells us how to interpret her characters (that Snape, for instance, isn't a hero), I begin to hear Zio Umberto muttering things in thick Italian. Hands off, signora! A book's a book - and even if future literary slueths shold prove that the whole series was actually penned by A.S. Byatt, then entrusted to an unknown and penniless Rowling to hide Byatt's torrid affaire de coeur with trivial literature - even then, Zio Umberto would say: So what? A book's a book. Words on a page. Who cares who wrote them? They belong to language now.
And yet ... is this reasonable? Won't they always be "her" stories - and doesn't that "her" convey some privledged relationship? If so, where and how do Author's rights and Books' rights - and Readers' rights (after all, they're *our* stories too!) - overlap? I suppose that the rules of inter- and intratextuality might help us sort out the property rights.
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For my own part - being the nostalgic sort - I'm always a bit reluctant to demand that Christopher Robin finally pack up his things and leave the forest, forbidden though it may, eventually, be. I survived the Silmarillion, and I'll read the Hogwarts Encyclopedia, too.