First of all, I think it's worth pointing out that Dumbledore isn't and can't be gay. Dumbledore doesn't exist. He's a fictional character, a construct of language. Two actors have played the role on film. Richard Harris was not gay--quite the opposite, in fact. Michael Gambon, the finest stage actor I have ever been privileged to see in person, plays Dumbledore now. Gambon is notoriously publicity shy, and much given to telling wild and amusing lies to those few interviewers who have been able to get permission to talk to him. Gambon has told the press that he was never gay and has been happily married for years, that he's not only not gay, but much enjoys the favors of his much younger girlfriend, and that he was once gay, but had to give it up because it made his eyes water. So we can make of that what we will.

As for Rex's main point, I sort of agree, but also don't agree as that point applies to Hogwarts. J. K. Rowling is in a unique position as a writer, and different rules apply to her. Nobody has ever created a fictional universe as popular as the one she created, and her fan base tends to be youngish. Of course, they have an insatiable curiosity about Harry and Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore. It's Rowling's imagined universe, and if she wants to tell us that Harry now works as an auror, it's because she rather thinks that's what he would do. I actually prefer to imagine that Harry teaches at Hogwarts: Defense Against the Dark Arts. But then, I also refuse to pronounce Hagrid the way the name is pronounced in the movies. For me, he'll always be Hay-grid.

It's hard to fault Rowling answering a direct question openly, but in fact, imagining Dumbledore as gay does help explain his relationship with Grindelwald, why a man as bright and decent as Dumbledore could have been fooled by a man as malevolent as Grindelwald. Charm only partly explains it--love, or at least infatuation, clarifies things. I'd wondered if Dumbledore might have been in love, and now I know Rowling thought so too. So there you go, a lucky guess vindicated. Him being gay doesn't matter to me at all, but it does to some people, and may make a few fans like the books a little less. Others will like the books a little more because of it. Personally, I'd much rather Rowling fix Quidditch--a spectacular but ill-conceived sport. Catching the Snitch is worth too many points--much better if catching the Snitch merely ends the match. Rowling gets the way guys like sports--what she doesn't get is sports.

.

I don't think this particular example is a matter of "interpretation" at all, and I think the Tolkien comparison is apt.

Tolkien may have refused to answer questions regarding what it all meant, but as for enlarging backstory, he couldn't stop. Every detail about every character's life (as well as those of their great-great-grandpas') showed up in an appendix somewhere. That's what Dumbledore's sexuality is like: it was something she knew about the character that just never made it into the book. If it hadn't come up in a Q&A, it would have showed up in the encyclopedia she's planning on writing to share all these unused facts.

It reminds me of an interview conducted just a few days after Deathly Hallows came out and she was asked how she kept the secret of Dumbledore's wand for so long. She said no one had ever asked--and she was glad because then she may have had to waffle on the answer and everyone would have known it was important.

But has she ever come out strong on the Christian allegory question? Not really. Her answer's been about the same as good old Tolkien's.

---

.

I wonder if it would be possible to accurately predict whether a writer is an out-there-somewhere believer or not simply based on her manner of telling.....

---

Ok, but the inferrence is part of the experience of the text so that, to me, counts. It's when you write a novel about a teenager and then talk about the teenager at 80 when, hey, that character never became 80 in the context of the piece of literature that was created....then I have a problem.

.



Simply put, a lot. We hear about it all the time. Stephen King almost can't shut up about it.

Me, I'm not as romantic as that, but the way you couched your question made me come up with a wild bit of faux doctrine that will have Bruce R McConkie's corpse spinning, viz, maybe we are accessing intelligences, uncreated not-yet individuals.

Okay. Once typed that looks even sillier than when it was merely in my head.

So let me go back to your other points. I may not be very mystical, but I'll slap anyone who says fiction isn't "true"--fiction is true--it has to be! That's why we need it, to learn truths--even if those truths can be boiled down to it's-fun-to-drive-fast-cars-and-make-it-with-hot-chicks. Not all truths, it would seem, are created equal.

Sometimes it's hard to stop growing a story, even after its natural end. And if I spent a decade creating an entire world and people weren't sick of hearing me talk about it, I wouldn't. I would want to talk more--about what I already know about that world and about what I'm still coming up with.

To suggest that authors are not masters of their own creations is ludicrous.

However, we are masters of our own experiences, and if we don't want to listen to someone tell us what happens to HOlden Caulfield after he gets hired at NASA, we don't have to listen. That is absolutely our right.

Freedom to speak.

Freedom not to listen.

---

.

Works don't come to life until people are arguing about them. And once its published, the author's voice is just one more out there in the wilderness. A more compelling one, perhaps, but one we should feel perfectly able to ignore.

---

Okay. This conversation has been dead for four months, but I want to say something, so I will. So there.

I like Kathleen's latest comment. I also like Eric Jepson's invocation of Tolkien as an example of an author who *did* do the same kind of thing Rex criticized Rowling for doing. Not just in the Appendices--he would get letters from people asking questions about his world, and would go on at great length about the answers, both providing additional details *and* interpreting his own work.

An interesting side example: science fiction author Roger Zelazny once said that for every novel he wrote, he would write a short story about some event in the main character's life that had nothing to do with the novel, just so he would know something more about the character that wasn't actually written in the novel--because he felt it gave a feeling of added depth and realism. He wouldn't publish these stories (except for one he published along with the essay where he wrote about this, essentially as an illustration). So there's always more of the story.

What kind of status should be given to these authorial additions? I suppose it depends on the question that's being asked/answered. If the question is: is this answer authoritative for this world, then I'd say, not necessarily, if it's not part of the published work. But that gets problematic. Wordsworth revised several of his poems, as I recall, but critics tend to prefer the earlier versions in many cases--arguing that the "Wordsworth" who later revised those poems wasn't the same "Wordsworth" who wrote them, being older, more conservative, no longer at the height of his poetic powers, etc.

In this case, even if you don't view Rowling's comments as part of the text, they certainly have now become part of the context within which the books are read. There's a paper waiting to be written there (and I'm sure it will be written, in multiple versions) about how the interpretation of the book changed/changes as a result of this comment, and whether it then becomes a different book, to at least part of its audience...

By the way, the main reason Tolkien didn't put forward allegorical interpretations of his work was that in his opinion it wasn't an allegory. As a medievalist, he had very definite opinions of what an allegory was, and his story wasn't one. His comment, "I much prefer history, true or feigned," should give us a clue as to his own mindset in this debate. He saw his story as part of an ongoing history. He could not have stopped creating his history any more than he could have stopped breathing, as the evidence of his later papers shows.

As for authors "channeling" characters that in some sense pre-exist out there... This has been a common enough report from enough different writers, whom I respect, that I think we have to respect it as an accurate reflection of their experience. I don't see what good it serves to argue with an author about what's going on in his or her own head. We don't necessarily have to agree--and certainly if our experience as an author has been different, we should feel free to tell our own differing experience--but saying "that's not what's really happening, of course" strikes me as a kind of prior rejection of the evidence.

Okay, enough. I'll check in again, in a month or two, and see if anyone actually read/responded to this...