JK Rowling’s recent statement that she
should never have written Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger as a couple has
sparked dramatic reactions from Harry Potter fans on Twitter. Personally, it’s taken
me right back to my mid-teenage years, when I spent many happy hours posting on
Harry Potter forums and occasionally discussing my preferred relationships for
the characters, although I was never as into ‘shipping’ as many fans were. At
any rate, I never liked any of the relationships in the actual books, but
neither was I a fan of popular ships such as Harry/Hermione (Harry/Luna and
Ginny/Neville were more my cup of tea) so there wasn’t so much for me to get
invested in. Nevertheless, I’ve been watching the fallout with some glee.
Ron/Hermione fans have been quick to turn
to ‘death of the author’ as a defence, and of course they’re right. Rowling has
finished the Harry Potter series, and
Ron and Hermione unequivocally appear as a couple in the books themselves,
turning up in the infamous epilogue with two children. In general, ‘death of
the author’ is a concept that I have a lot of sympathy with. Once the text
leaves a writer’s hands, he or she is just another reader – and the problem
with an author’s interpretation of the text is that it often ignores all the
unconscious things that are written into it. Especially with genre fiction – to
generalise horribly, it tends to be less precisely planned and edited, perhaps
because of the tight timescale that genre authors have to stick to - the things
that get into a novel without the author’s explicit ‘consent’ are often the
most interesting. As I wrote last week, discussing Holby City, it’s the gaps and fudges in a text where the real work
gets done, and an author can’t plaster over those by issuing her opinion years
after the work is published.
And yet. I think the reason I feel quite so
gleeful is that there was always an attitude among some Harry Potter fans,
including some Ron/Hermione shippers (not all by any means), that their
preferred relationships were better because they were gloriously right – proved
right not only by the books themselves, but by Rowling’s own statements. These
fans were happy to point to interviews as further proof of their rightness, and
to shoot down ships such as Neville/Luna because Rowling stated in interview
that these two never got together. So it is somewhat ironic to see them
grabbing at ‘death of the author’ as a defence now. What I take from Rowling’s
statement is not that Ron/Hermione shippers have somehow been ‘proved wrong’,
but that the author herself has now suggested an interesting avenue through
which to explore the texts, if fans so choose. Personally, I have no investment
in Harry and Hermione (or Hermione and whoever) as a couple, but I do think
it’s interesting to read texts against the grain, to spot the cracks and the
gaps, and for this, it helps to know if the author had conflicting intentions
when she was writing, even if you don’t agree with her eventual conclusions. In
these awkward links, the author ‘rises again’, because her intentions once
again become a guide to the text, although not perhaps in the way that she
would have wished.
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