Elsewhere:

• J.K. Rowling, writing in the capacity of a former single mother living on welfare, isn’t buying what David Cameron is selling. In a somewhat frivolous response, Toby Young leaps on the Tory nostalgia of the Harry Potter books, pointing to Hogwarts’ Etonian idyll while somehow neglecting to mention the conspicuously nuclear families; but anyone who paid attention to Rowling’s finer points (which doesn’t include Mr Young, I’m afraid) knows full well her politics aren’t what he thinks they are.

• Film editor Todd Miro savages Hollywood colour grading for taking us into a nightmare world of orange and teal.

• Roger Ebert articulates his controversial belief that video games can never be art—not for the first time, though it’s nice to finally see him elaborate on it in one place. I’m of the opinion that the entire semantic quagmire is easily evaded if we adopt an instrumental definition of art. Regardless of whether video games are even theoretically comparable to the great works of other media, our only way of getting at qualitative findings about creativity and beauty in game design is to borrow from the language of art, so we may as well consider them as such.

• While on the subject of aesthetics: over at Gödel’s Lost Letter, R.J. Lipton’s fantastic computing science blog, are some germinal sketches of how one might study great mathematical proofs as great art.

• The International Spy Museum briefs us on Josephine Baker, the actress-heroine of the French Resistance.

• Paul Wells visits the Canadian forces in Kandahar and reports on the shift in the tone and strategy of their counterinsurgency efforts. This is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read on the present state of the war in Afghanistan and I can’t recommend it enough.

• Strange Maps documents two wonderful specimens of literary cartography: back covers of mystery paperbacks, and a poster for a Shakespeare conference in France depicting a town that looks like the Bard.

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Jonah Lehrer wonders if the direction of funding towards older scientists hinders us from tapping into the creativity of youth. Also read the followup on his Frontal Cortex blog.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

In brief: This companion book to the Harry Potter series condenses Rowling’s thematic material into five playful fables, each delivered with the impeccable polish and Pythonic cleverness we have come to expect. The annotations written in the voice of Albus Dumbledore provide the Potterverse with a suggested literary history that parodies our own, though they unwisely attempt to interpret the fairy tales on the reader’s behalf.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Tales of Beedle the Bard, keep reading below.)

The Tales of Beedle the Bard marks the third time that J.K. Rowling has taken a fictitious book mentioned in the Harry Potter series and spun it into a companion volume for charity, after Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. (Hogwarts: A History is almost certainly on the drawing board, though for my part, I am still waiting for Charm Your Own Cheese.)

Beedle is a departure from Quidditch and Fantastic Beasts in two respects: first, it is a narrative work rather than an accompanying reference; and second, it plays a small but critical role in the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with which you are no doubt already familiar if you have read this far.

The collection consists of five stories, each of which explores a familiar thematic question from the Harry Potter books:

1. “The Wizard and the Hopping-Pot”: Given that magical ability is inherited like a recessive gene—you’re either born with it or you aren’t—what responsibility do wizards have to non-magical peoples?
2. “The Fountain of Fair Fortune”: When are boons assigned to magical causes actually the product of free decisions and changes in personal attitudes?
3. “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart”: What is the peril of thinking of love as a human weakness?
4. “Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump”: How should non-magical society treat those of special talent?
5. “The Tale of the Three Brothers”: Can you run from Death, or only hide?

If you’ve read the Potter series, you already know the answers to all five.

The stories vary in both their tone and their connectedness to Harry Potter’s world. While the whimsical “Hopping-Pot” and the chivalric “Fountain” play it safe within the bounds of fairy-tale orthodoxy, “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” is a gruesome horror-show ripped out of the chests of the Brothers Grimm. (The Dumbledore commentaries that accompany the stories make the ironic point that in the wizarding world, it was the first two that were subject to bowdlerization for their vulgar suggestion that wizards and Muggles could mingle, while “The Warlock’s Hairy Heart” propagated from one generation to the next with little transformation.)

“Babbity Rabbity” is the story that gets the most mileage out of the premise that the tales of Beedle the Bard are medieval in origin, predating the segregation of the magical and Muggle worlds in wizarding history. Playing along with the illusion that Beedle the Bard is a discovered text from the past, Dumbledore’s notes on the story take care to comment on its adherence to the physical laws of magic as distinct from the contractual laws, the ones regulated by modern magical government. Broadly speaking, the Dumbledore afterwords—which comprise half the book, and are every bit as much a part of the book as the stories themselves—are at their best when they situate their respective tales in the context of Rowling’s imagined history.

The commentaries also serve as a vessel for Rowling’s views on issues such as literary censorship, which are of obvious real-world relevance, considering the moral hysteria in some circles over the Potter novels (along with everything else written for children and young adults, it must be said). It is Rowling’s unambiguous view that children need not be protected from the outside world; indeed, to do so is irresponsible in the extreme. A character named Beatrix Bloxam appears in several of Dumbledore’s annotations as a redactor of tales and a literary surrogate for Dolores Umbridge:

Mrs Bloxam believed that The Tales of Beedle the Bard were damaging to children because of what she called ‘their unhealthy preoccupation with the most horrid subjects, such as death, disease, bloodshed, wicked magic, unwholesome characters and bodily effusions and reuptions of the most digusting kind’. Mrs Bloxam took a variety of old stories, including several of Beedle’s, and rewrote them according to her ideals, which she expressed as ‘filling the pure minds of our little angels with healthy, happy thoughts, keeping their sweet slumber free of wicked dreams and protecting the precious flower of their innocence’.

I should think it is natural to read this as Rowling’s way of thumbing her nose at her critics, and generating a treasure chest of funds for charity while she’s at it.

Potter readers will of course remember “The Tale of the Three Brothers” as the story that introduces the Deathly Hallows in the book by that name. There is nothing to the story here above and beyond what we already know from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; it is included for completeness, as the tale that linked Beedle the Bard to the conclusion of Harry Potter in the first place. Dumbledore’s notes on it, however, are of especial interest as an extended exercise in dramatic irony. Observe:

But which of us would have shown the wisdom of the third brother, if offered the pick of Death’s gifts? Wizards and Muggles alike are imbued with a lust for power; how many would resist ‘the Wand of Destiny’? Which human being, having lost someone they loved, could withstand the temptation of the Resurrection Stone? Even I, Albus Dumbledore, would find it easiest to refuse the Invisibility Cloak; which only goes to show that, clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else.

Rowling’s introduction to The Tales of Beedle the Bard tells us that “the notes were completed around eighteen months before the tragic events that took place at the top of Hogwarts’ Astronomy Tower.” Dumbledore knows damn well that the Hallows exist, and he has a good idea of their whereabouts. Note that his notes predate his acquisition of the Resurrection Stone, a fact that imbues his rhetorical questions with a wistful air.

If the annotations detract in any way, it is in how Dumbledore’s readings have a habit of spelling out the already self-evident morals of the stories, thus snatching some of the interpretive responsibility from the reader. The magic of fairy tales has never been in their straightforwardness. Fairy tales draw much of their lasting power from their ability to say a lot more, in very little space, than any individual explication. It is therefore easy to get the sense that the imposition of any single reading takes away from the conceptual space of possibility opened by the deceptively simple architecture for which fairy tales are known. And should we choose to read them as fables with unambiguous morals, we can do it without outside help, thank you very much.

In the end, “The Tale of the Three Brothers” remains the most satisfying of the Beedle stories because it functions, to a far greater degree than the other stories in the collection, as a foundational myth that defines the underlying narrative structure of the Harry Potter universe. In The Deathly Hallows, Rowling invites us not to interpret the Three Brothers in the context of Harry Potter, but to interpret Harry Potter in the context of the Three Brothers—much as we can absorb a stunning proportion of Western literature, Harry Potter included, in terms of Homer’s Odyssey or the Book of Genesis.

This is not to say that the four other stories don’t aspire to the same stature; they do, albeit with less success. As I illustrated at the beginning of the review, they all exhibit some form of thematic consistency with the grounding premises of the Harry Potter series. In fact, it is remarkable that they achieve this at all, considering that titles like “The Wizard and the Hopping-Pot” and “Babbity Rabbity and her Cackling Stump” originally appeared as a throwaway joke about the childishness (yet curious universality) of the Beedle tales.

But without Rowling there to speak in the voice of Albus Dumbledore and give us a wealth of fictitious history about how fundamental these stories are to the collective consciousness of the wizarding world, we might never have thought of them as very important at all. “The Tale of the Three Brothers” stands out because it truly feels like it precedes the modern Potterverse, along with the Muggle world we know.

Fans at New York’s Carnegie Hall were initially stunned into silence by the announcement, but soon started clapping and cheering.

JK said: “I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy.”

The news should help to clear up lots of rumours about [the character's] mysterious past once and for all.

Yes, I’m quite sure it will.

Rowling has made some additional statements, defending the supposed lack of textual evidence or relevance by arguing that the character “did have, as I say, this rather tragic infatuation, but that was a key part of the ending of the story so there it is. Why would I put the key part of my ending of my story in Book 1?” And she’s quite right. Spoilers follow.

I’d go on to argue that the question, “What was Dumbledore’s tragic flaw?” was the most important question that was left unanswered before the seventh book, as it determined a great deal of the other unanswered questions about the plot. The fact that I was wrong about this question is at the heart of why I was wrong about several things in my pre-Hallows speculations, particularly Snape’s allegiance, and how I dealt with my inaccurate guesses in my Potter postmortem.

As I said in the latter piece:

The primary basis for my belief that Snape was first and foremost on a side that wasn’t Dumbledore’s was that on a purely literary level, I thought it necessary for Dumbledore to have some ultimate imperfection that prevented him from deterministically orchestrating Voldemort’s downfall all by himself. It was essential that Harry had some knowledge or intuition that Dumbledore did not to truly call Voldemort’s defeat his own. To me, that meant Dumbledore had to have overlooked something, perhaps in the form of a misplaced trust.

So my reaction to the idea that Dumbledore ordered Snape to kill him amounted to, “That wouldn’t make Dumbledore terribly interesting.”

In The Deathly Hallows, Rowling gets away with it by giving Dumbledore a far more interesting character flaw than simply being too trusting, and one that sheds new light on Dumbledore’s chat with Harry at the end of The Order of the Phoenix: Dumbledore struggles with the balance between impassionate tactical genius and passionate concern for those who are to actually carry out his orders. Unbeknownst to Harry and thereby, the reader, that’s the real developmental path that Dumbledore follows over the course of the first six books.

We can generalize the statement I’ve put in boldface and say that Dumbledore’s struggle is to balance the responsibilities associated with his tactical genius with his passionate concern for, well, anybody. Dumbledore never made errors of ignorance—only errors of judgment. In Harry Potter, love conquers all, but that doesn’t mean it can’t cause a number of complications.

There’s a provisional transcription of the Q&A, and I say “provisional”, because at the time of this writing the transcription is riddled with typos up to and including misplaced negations. It’s a valuable document nonetheless, as Rowling discusses some things we all wondered about, like Aberforth Dumbledore and his goats.

As one might expect, the global juggernaut of the Harry Potter fan base has reacted almost schismatically (to the matter of sexual orientation, not the goats), and their responses fall into several camps. Here’s why all of them are wrong.

First, the relevant quotation:

Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] … Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extend, but he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that’s how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair… [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, “Dumbledore’s gay!” [laughter] If I’d known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!

I should clarify, before I continue, that I’m proud of the fans at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere for their overwhelmingly positive reception of the news. Of course, bigots don’t read Harry Potter, but I think we should account for the fact that most of the Potter-readers who might feel discomfort with a gay Dumbledore do not consider themselves bigots.

More often than not, we can expect people to have a certain personal anxiety from having conceived of a character a certain way, admiring that conception, maybe even identifying with it intimately—then one day, waking up to the author’s remarks and thinking, “That’s not at all how I imagined him.” And that personal discomfort—be it driven by unconscious prejudices or not—is independent of their beliefs with respect to the rights, liberties, or affirmative privileges that homosexuals should be entitled to in a fair and equal society. In short, I don’t think it’s inherently homophobic if you’re not particularly thrilled. I think it’s perfectly understandable.

Without further ado, permit me to look smart and use a lot of big words.

Camp “We Told You So”: These people are the least wrong, but not quite as un-wrong as they were that time they told me Snape was a good guy who loved Lily all along, and I didn’t believe them. If you are one of these people, you should pat yourself on the back for coming to the same interpretation as the author before she ever told you that was the case. Don’t get too comfy, though, because your opponents aren’t going down without a fight, as we’ll see further down. Let’s move on.

Camp “This Explains Everything!”: No it doesn’t. I think that considering Dumbledore’s motivations with Rowling’s remarks in mind adds depth to his character, especially given how much of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is driven by an examination of the difficult decisions he had to make, and why he made them the way he did. But here’s the rub: the item that is relevant to our reading of the character isn’t the statement “Dumbledore is gay.” The relevant statement is “Dumbledore loved Grindelwald.”

If we are to take that love as being more along the lines of eros (as opposed to philia, agape and the other one), Dumbledore’s alleged homosexuality is an extrapolation, not a cause. It’s not a bad extrapolation, mind you, because it’s true that he didn’t get involved with any women, and Rowling went out of her way to keep him so in any medium. But to play Voldemort’s advocate for a moment: he didn’t develop a similar attraction to any other men, either. To those of you who are shouting, “But what about Harry Potter?”—oh, I’ll deal with you later, you bet I will.

(I think Rowling errs here in one respect: she muddies the water by passing on her tacit assumption that the fact that Dumbledore loved another young man once—a highly relevant item—necessarily makes him gay, which isn’t nearly as important. This initially seems intuitive until you ask yourself which is the cause, and which is the effect, and tie yourself up in various metaphysical knots. The whole shebang is too complicated for even my understanding, so I’ll just defer to fiction and suggest once again that you read Michael Chabon.)

Camp “This Doesn’t Change Anything”: Given how much I harp on about the intentional fallacy, I’m sympathetic to the position that just because J.K. Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, it doesn’t make him so. The hullabaloo reminds me of how a few years ago, Ridley Scott told everyone Rick Deckard was a Replicant, and nobody cared. Regardless of what Ridley Scott thought he was doing, the ending of the 1992 Director’s Cut of Blade Runner ends on an ambiguous note, and its openness to interpretation was what made the film resonate. (I’m not sure if this has changed in the 2007 Final Cut, as I haven’t seen it yet.)

But—and this is a very big but, which I suppose makes me look like an ass—the balance of competing interpretations always tilts in favour of argumentation and evidence. And now that Rowling has drawn our attention to Dumbledore’s sexual orientation by saying, “This is the interpretation I had in mind,” it is up to us as readers to evaluate that particular critical reading and see if it makes sense. We are under no obligation to adhere to Rowling’s intentions if they are not in evidence in the text itself. In fact, it’s the only way in which literary criticism can claim any rigour as a discipline; see Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism for details.

The intention of the author isn’t something that dictates how we should read her book. Intentions are only the author’s moves in a game where she tries to lead us into believing what she wants us to believe, and seeing the patterns she wants us to see; the better the storyteller, the more likely it is the readers will fall into her traps. And J.K. Rowling is an exemplary storyteller.

Camp “No He’s Not!”: You see, the tricky thing about literary interpretation is that it’s not scientific; its claims aren’t falsifiable. This is especially true when we investigate psychoanalytic questions like whether or not a given character’s actions were a manifestation of something repressed, because the individual psyche is resiliently walled off from objective observation. In order to establish that Dumbledore is not gay, there are two possible avenues: 1) demonstrate positive evidence to the contrary, or 2) show us how the interpretations of a gay Dumbledore make spurious arguments that don’t follow from the textual evidence (and be aware that the body of evidence includes established patterns that indicate homosexuality or repression in other works of art). For bonus marks, look for arguments that Dumbledore was homosexual predating Rowling’s revelation today, so there’s no risk of deference to stated authorial intention.

The first option is pretty much shot, which leaves you contrarian folks with the second. It can be done—I just think it would be difficult. An instructive example is atheism. The existence of God isn’t a falsifiable claim, in part because its adherents claim that metaphysics precedes the empirical evidence; thus, it’s impossible to obtain positive evidence demonstrating a Godless universe. So what they do instead is pursue the second option, and demonstrate that the arguments for God’s existence don’t make sense either, because they always end up deferring to some assumption that couldn’t have come from anywhere other than the authority of their chosen holy book. The atheists go a step further than the agnostics because they assign a burden of proof.

Unfortunately, the atheists have it a lot better off than you do, as it’s actually quite easy to infer, from the obvious and directly observed human manufacture of most religions and mythologies, that the burden of proof is squarely on the theists (if we demand any proof at all, and most reasonable theists won’t). There isn’t much of a basis to claim that in Harry Potter, the burden is on people who believe Dumbledore is gay; this would only make sense if we are to fundamentally presume that literary characters are heterosexual until shown otherwise. That’s logically problematic.

On the flipside, I should reiterate for the gay-Dumbledore defenders that “But J.K. Rowling said he is, so nyaah nyaah” isn’t good enough. The burden of proof falls on everybody’s shoulders. It’s valid for people to say, “I personally didn’t read Dumbledore as homosexual, so by golly, I’m not going to”; they’re just going to have a hard time convincing anyone else.

For example, in the same Q&A, Rowling said that Neville Longbottom married Hannah Abbott. There’s nothing to indicate this in the books whatsoever, so as someone reading the book, you really don’t have to believe this if you don’t want to. It would make you an outsider from the general consensus when it comes to actually talking about Harry Potter with other people, but if that’s your cup of tea, nobody’s going to stop you.

Camp “Political Correctness Strikes Again”: This is the argument that she has a gay character for the express sake of having one. Typically, my answer to this would be, “You only notice the allegedly forced political correctness because diversity isn’t normative to you already. It’s your problem.” But in this case, Rowling actually is forcing an element of diversity into the Potterverse, as she does on numerous occasions (for example, by making Dean Thomas and Angelina Johnson black—initially surprising to some readers until they step back and realize how important Rowling finds it to reflect the diaspora of the Great British Public in the wizarding world). In her own words, from the same Q&A:

The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry; and I think it’s one of the reasons that some people don’t like the books, but I think that’s it’s a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

What is important to keep in mind here is that we can see a causal connection between Dumbledore’s love for Grindelwald and his subsequent actions. This wouldn’t be the case if, say, George Lucas held a press conference tomorrow and told everyone Obi-Wan Kenobi was gay. In that case, we could accuse Lucas of slapping a beloved character with a superfluous trait, because in the context of the story, Obi-Wan makes so much more sense as an asexual ascetic (and possibly even a heterosexual one, if you detect the undercurrent of jealousy that Anakin harbours for him in Revenge of the Sith). Rowling isn’t simply content to make Dumbledore gay for the sake of having somebody be gay: she writes him in a fashion that makes him understandable in light of having loved and lost.

Camp “Shameless Publicity Stunt”: Honestly, do you think she needs the money?

Camp “But Now the Puritans Will Hate Us Even More”: The puritanical elements of society hate the books already. Let them bugger off to Plymouth Rock. I agree that it’s a legitimate concern that parents who read offhand in some sensational headline that Dumbledore is gay might attempt to guard their children from reading the book. And I think it’s entirely appropriate to laugh at them, because those children must have some mighty critical reading skills to pick up on the homosexuality at all, which they wouldn’t have developed in the first place without being familiar with sexual repression in literature—in which case their parents weren’t very good Lord Protectors.

Even so, placating ignorant parents so their kids will have unfettered access to good books is, while well intentioned, not something we should be doing. We should be taking an assertive and confrontational stance against these parents and the libraries that accede to their demands for censorship, as we did with Huckleberry Finn, as we did with Bridge to Terabithia, and as we’ve already done several times over with Harry Potter.

Camp “They Should Have Cast Ian McKellen”: As Gandalf would say, throw yourself in next time and rid us of your stupidity. Actors. Characters. Jesus Christ.

Camp “But What About Harry?”: Does this pervert their student-teacher relationship? No it doesn’t. Straight people can be pedophiles too, you know. Asking this question, however, does put us on the right track for another line of analysis: Dumbledore’s actions in The Order of the Phoenix, and much of Harry’s development in that book, are a direct result of Dumbledore deliberately passing off their relationship as wholly impersonal. He tells Harry that he did it to protect himself from Voldemort, but keep in mind that this is the same guy who said he looked in the Mirror of Erised and saw a pair of socks. It’s not until The Deathly Hallows that we see a definite tension between competing representations of Dumbledore as a character, with Elphias Doge on one side of the fence and Rita Skeeter on the other—and Rita Skeeter is just frothing at the mouth to paint Harry’s relationship wtih Dumbledore as something unsavoury.

We do eventually discover that Dumbledore’s reportedly salacious past had to do with his parents and sister, but the relevant point here is that Rowling is also making an argument about journalistic ethics. Rita Skeeter’s commitment to ad hominem sensationalism immediately resonates with the ethical debate about “outing” public figures such as politicians. The idea of a homosexual Dumbledore lends force to what is already an implicit social commentary.

From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Chapter Two (“In Memoriam”):

‘Oh yes,’ says Skeeter, nodding briskly, ‘I devote an entire chapter to the whole Potter-Dumbledore relationship. It’s been called unhealthy, even sinister. Again, your readers will have to buy my book for the whole story, but there is no question that Dumbledore took an unnatural interest in Potter from the word go. Whether that was really in the boy’s best interests—well, we’ll see. It’s certainly an open secret that Potter has had a most troubled adolescence.’

You can’t tell me that you read that passage and didn’t immediately think it was a not-too-subtle accusation or allegory of pedophilia. I think it has even more impact in light of a gay Dumbledore, given that so much of the hysteria over homosexuality is allegedly about protecting the children (reasonable enough, given the deplorable actions of people in positions of power like numerous members of the clergy, but not a sound logical basis for painting all homosexuals with the same brush—as the Skeeter-types tend to do, intentionally or not).

(An aside about biographical ethics: is it just me, or did we just have this debate last week?)

Concluding remarks. Dumbledore is gay if you read him as gay. Dumbledore is not necessarily gay if you do not read him as gay. Clearly, J.K. Rowling is encouraging us all to read him one way over the other; and I think it’s an interpretation that makes the books better, as it makes several connections more coherent.

The only real objective in reaching an hermeneutic consensus is so readers have a common foundation for constructing further interpretive connections. This is why fans of any major serial narrative that exists in several media insist on establishing a consensual “canon” for discussion and debate, one that often includes the author’s remarks as the most authoritative source next to the text itself, as is the case at Harry Potter resources such as the Harry Potter Lexicon (here’s their canon policy). But even in establishing a canon, the strategy of deferring to the author has its limitations. It didn’t work so well for Star Wars, where George Lucas initially conceived of Owen Lars as Obi-Wan’s brother before changing his mind twenty years later: in developing the Prequels, he was beholden to nothing but the material in the existing films, and even that he was willing to change.

Not that it matters much, because the primary purpose of defining a canon is to guide speculation about future official works.

This reminds me of what J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his preface to later editions of The Lord of the Rings, in response to accusations that the Ring represented the atom bomb, or that Middle-Earth represented World War II Europe:

As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, [The Lord of the Rings] has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’: but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purported domination of the author.

Which didn’t stop every serious Tolkien scholar from pointing out the obvious connections between Mordor and Nazi Germany anyway and saying, come on, J.R.R., you’re pulling our leg. In Chapter IV of J.R.R Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey makes a persuasive case that Tolkien allegorized all the time, and that his real opposition was to literature (and critical interpretations) in which there is nothing over and above the allegorical correspondences. Tolkien firmly believed in the unity of a story as a legitimate imaginative exercise in and of itself—the cornerstone of his other great legacy, his influential transformation of Beowulf criticism. (The irony is that, as Shippey points out, Tolkien made his point about Beowulf using allegory.)

The lesson here is twofold: take everything the author says with a grain of salt, and interpret the book however in the blazes you want. It’s true that often, the soundest interpretation may be one that the author wanted you to reach. It’s hard to say if that’s a reflection on the author or the reader.

As for homosexuality proper—I’m going to borrow some language here from my very limited background in artificial intelligence: this is ultimately a problem of “default reasoning”. The real problem, if we are to consider it a problem (and some people will tell you it’s a very big one), is that when we read someone, be it a fictional character or someone we meet in the real world, we initially “bind” them to the assumption that they have the Most Statistically Probable Sexual Orientation. This usually means we assume they are heterosexual, but not always (in the case of commonly stereotyped indicators like pink attire for men, men’s hairstyles for women, and enrolments in the Department of English).

In other words: if Rowling’s remarks were at all shocking to you, you should think about who it was that assumed Dumbledore was heterosexual in the first place. The ideal (and admittedly unattainable) solution is not to prejudge anyone as anything, ever.

Unless they like Dan Brown. Always suspect a person who likes Dan Brown.

I did it. I made it through to the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows completely unspoiled by external sources. Well, almost completely – while I never received any confirmation of some of the critical details, I was surprised by how easily the public consensus predicted them in the more popular speculations I was so quick to dismiss as “too easy.”

It’s still a remarkable feat, because the conduct of the Muggle mainstream press throughout this entire affair has been completely unacceptable. Having read the book, I’ve now looked at some of the articles that have been run on the front pages of several newspapers, and I am astounded and appalled at how much they reveal. In some cases, the articles amount to no more or less than summaries of the final chapters.

How does this pass for news? What purpose does a paper serve by publishing this aside from being a bunch of complete wankers?

Okay, now let’s talk about the book.

Do not read below this point if you have not read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Ready?

I loved it.

If there was a single speck of disappointment that blemished my initial experience of the final Harry Potter volume, it’s that so many people figured out the answers to some of the major questions so far in advance. It’s very unlike J.K. Rowling to actually deliver precisely what her readers expect. She doesn’t do that throughout the book, mind you; I think I may confine that impression to the chapter entitled “The Prince’s Tale,” in which we find out…

(If you haven’t read it, go away. And if you’re going to read on anyway because you don’t really care to read the Potter books yourself, I’d hate to be blunt, but we’re simply not going to be friends.)

… in which we find out that Snape was acting on Dumbledore’s orders all along, Harry is a seventh Horcrux, and Snape’s primary motivation was his lifelong love for Lily Evans.

I was a resident contrarian on the first two counts and possibly (but noncommittally) the third. It didn’t seem to click in theory. I’ve offered a few arguments to that effect, but the hidden, irrational hunch behind it all was that I simply didn’t believe Ms. Rowling would be that predictable.

It doesn’t matter, because the execution was superb.

The primary basis for my belief that Snape was first and foremost on a side that wasn’t Dumbledore’s was that on a purely literary level, I thought it necessary for Dumbledore to have some ultimate imperfection that prevented him from deterministically orchestrating Voldemort’s downfall all by himself. It was essential that Harry had some knowledge or intuition that Dumbledore did not to truly call Voldemort’s defeat his own. To me, that meant Dumbledore had to have overlooked something, perhaps in the form of a misplaced trust.

So my reaction to the idea that Dumbledore ordered Snape to kill him amounted to, “That wouldn’t make Dumbledore terribly interesting.”

In The Deathly Hallows, Rowling gets away with it by giving Dumbledore a far more interesting character flaw than simply being too trusting, and one that sheds new light on Dumbledore’s chat with Harry at the end of The Order of the Phoenix: Dumbledore struggles with the balance between impassionate tactical genius and passionate concern for those who are to actually carry out his orders. Unbeknownst to Harry and thereby, the reader, that’s the real developmental path that Dumbledore follows over the course of the first six books.

More importantly from a narrative point of view, even up to the point of Snape’s death, there’s virtually nothing that assures the reader of a certain answer. I started to have an inkling I might be wrong about Snape when I saw just how much thought and preparation Albus Dumbledore had put into his will in order to lead our heroes on the trail of a Grail Quest we didn’t know existed.

As for Harry being the last Horcrux, Rowling met the necessary conditions with what I considered the only possible route for that to be the case: it was extraneous to the six that Dumbledore suspected, it was unknown to Voldemort himself, and its creation was an entirely accidental result. Now, here’s the rub: how long had Dumbledore known? If anything, Harry’s last scene with him in the limbo of King’s Cross reveals that the infamous “gleam of triumph” in The Goblet of Fire manifested Dumbledore’s realization that there was a way of removing Voldemort’s soul fragment from Harry without killing the latter.

Then why deliberately feed Snape misinformation about how Harry has to die? The two reasons I can think of are the obvious ones. First, the reader has to believe that it’s a definite possibility that Harry must perish. Second, it’s with the understanding that Snape’s memory of Dumbledore’s orders will eventually reach Harry, and the plan only works if Harry faces Death confidently and in good faith.

All in all, it’s really the new material – most prominently, the Deathly Hallows and the background surrounding Dumbledore and Grindelwald – that makes the book. At around the halfway mark, one wonders when Harry is actually going to get around to stomping some Horcruxes, but that only amplifies the degree to which one can sympathize with Ron’s impatience with the lack of any apparent plan of action. And although Ron and Hermione don’t get nearly as involved with the final climax as one would reasonably expect, Ron’s return in the chapter entitled “The Silver Doe” may be the best scene in the book – every bit a true fulfilment of the character’s personal journey as that later incident involving the Sword of Gryffindor, Neville Longbottom and a more than nearly headless snake.

As a completely tangential aside: when I first read that one alias of the Elder Wand was the Deathstick, all I could think of was Ewan MacGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi: “You don’t want to sell me deathsticks. You want to go home and rethink your life.”

I do have one concern. It’s a concern, not a complaint, but I think it’s worth mentioning. It’s really not until this book that it becomes clear that Unforgivable Curses (with the possible exception of the Killing Curse) are entirely a legal matter, not a moral one. It was certainly discomfiting to see Harry tossing them about willy-nilly in places, even if they were out of necessity, as in the Gringotts robbery. It was an unexpected direction for Rowling to take, and creates a certain ambiguity when it comes to defining what the criteria are for considering a spell to be one of the Dark Arts. Is it based on means or consequences? Certainly, the “good guys” kill, maim or torture just as readily, though there’s a certain poetry to how Voldemort finishes himself off because he runs into a disarming spell.

One last thing (for now, as there’s a limitless supply of material to discuss now that there’s no more Potter coming): I remember reading that Rowling wrote the last chapter (which I take to be the “Nineteen Years Later” epilogue… why nineteen?) way back near the beginning and stowed it away. It shows, and I say that with the utmost ambivalence. The writing abruptly jerks you back to the innocent tone of the first two books, almost as if the series never really developed in scope, and renders the entire segment a tad out of place. I suppose that’s the benefit of restoring some semblance of natural order to the Potterverse, but I would have preferred a more reflective present-day denouement, especially after the excellent ones that capped the fifth and sixth.

Then again, for all the mundanity of an ending where the happy high school couples stay together, live happily ever after and see their kids to school has a certain assuring tone to it: unlike their father, Harry’s kids get to be sent off to Hogwarts by their loving parents. That’s a difference worth remarking upon, is it not?

Primary unanswered question (and I’m sure others would agree): what horrific memory did Dudley relive in the Dementor attack in The Order of the Phoenix? Answer: unknown, but I’m not sure it’s so relevant now that we know his shock and silence was probably not at the Dementors themselves, but the fact that Harry stuck his neck out for him. I was wondering how Rowling would send off the Dursleys, and I can’t imagine her doing it any better. The clincher was when Harry called Dudley “Big D” in earnest. When you’re reading a book, it’s that kind of moment that makes you feel like a boy who lived.

It’s not until a few hours afterwards that the post-Potter depression really sets in.

We’re done. Life goes on. And at the end of all things, nobody tickled a sleeping dragon.

There’s been a leak online, and I personally know at least one individual who legitimately claims to have read the book. To me, the next three days are nothing more or less than a treacherous challenge to survive unblemished in a viral world polluted with too much information. I have summarily severed all inbound lines of communication. If word gets out in the next few days that a lit-crazed science camp instructor has viciously silenced a small child or three, you’ll know why, and you can tell it to the cops that I solemnly swear they were up to no good.

Here are my final predictions. I don’t have time to offer as thorough a rationale for each of them as I’d like; some of them are hunches, and some of them are cases of deliberately contrarian muckraking. If I’m right, I promise you I didn’t cheat. If I’m wrong, I’ll look rather silly, won’t I? But just this once, that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Let’s start with the important questions.

Snape, Snape, Severus Snape. Evil.

I’ve lost sleep mulling over this and flipping back and forth, but after reading through all six of the preceding volumes again, I’m going back to the same initial impression I had when I first read Half-Blood Prince; see this blog’s most (inexplicably) popular post of all time for details. I can understand the argument that Snape killed Dumbledore on Dumbledore’s last-minute orders – making yourself completely vulnerable and committing assisted suicide to plant a double-agent right-hand man? Ingenious! – but I just don’t buy it.

First: Dumbledore wouldn’t order someone to commit murder, even as someone who believes that death is the next great adventure. I really do believe Snape took him by surprise, and that Dumbledore petrified Harry to prevent any interference only when it came to Draco Malfoy – who, as I’ve said before, probably had the right idea about Snape all along. As for the pleading, we may confidently infer that Dumbledore’s condition was something only Snape could properly address. We’ve also been told time and again that an Unforgivable Curse doesn’t work unless you really mean it and take pleasure in the act of violence.

Was Snape just securing himself the advantageous position of Voldemort’s real first lieutenant and “most loyal servant,” the delusion successively held by Peter Pettigrew, Barty Crouch Jr. and Bellatrix Lestrange (and before that, arguably Lucius Malfoy)? I doubt it. Snape, of all people, is in a position to understand that someone like Voldemort doesn’t put much stock in first lieutenants. He’s too cunning to believe that there’s any safety in such a position. I think Snape is primarily looking out for his own survival, the true mark of a Slytherin.

Will Snape end up doing something in favour of the good guys? Almost certainly, whether it’s intentional on his part or not. Will Harry forgive him? Unquestionably, not least because of our boy hero’s continued assurances that it will never happen. That’s something we’ll leave for the action in the seventh book. What I’m far more interested in is the motivation behind what Snape has been up to so far.

I think it’s imperative that we accept that Dumbledore is a flawed character – someone who has a gaping hole in his wisdom because of his willingness to see the best in people. Sooner or later, somebody was going to take advantage of it, and that someone turned out to be Snape. (Ironically, it was Dumbledore alone who saw right through the young Tom Riddle.) I was waffling on this, but what convinced me for good was this article comparing Severus the Half-Blood Prince to Severus in Machiavelli’s The Prince. There’s no way that kind of correlation is just another inconsequential blip on the radar.

Does it impugn Harry’s maturation as a character to say that on some level, he was right to have an irrational dislike of Snape all along? Maybe, but one other thing to remember about Half-Blood Prince is that much of it is a case of the boy who cried wolf: for once, Harry’s intuition is right on the money, but everyone is so used to it being ostensibly wrong that they didn’t take him seriously when it came to, say, Draco Malfoy’s degree of involvement in Voldemort’s cause.

Snape is far more dangerous than we give him credit for. He’s already accomplished two things that Voldemort only ever dreamed of doing: teaching Defence Against the Dark Arts, and getting Dumbledore out of the way. I’m not saying I’d place him as the primary antagonist over Voldemort himself, though others have pursued that train of thought; the symmetry isn’t quite there, and I’d say that even though Half-Blood Prince was named for Snape, the primary contribution it made to the series was its reassertion of a solid and credible basis for believing that Voldemort is as much of a villain as everybody makes him out to be.

I may end up eating crow, of course, and if I do, I think I know why. It’s because we still don’t know why Dumbledore trusted Snape. This is one of the two big uncertainties that characters in the book (never mind the readers) have occasionally mistaken for certainties, the other one being, “Why couldn’t Voldemort kill Harry?” Harry recognizes the sheer implausibility that Dumbledore could be hoodwinked by Snape’s apparent remorse for the deaths of the Potters. Well, it’s not just implausible – it’s impossible. In Goblet of Fire, we learned that Dumbledore testified that Snape defected prior to Voldemort’s fall. That means the defection had to occur before Voldemort marched into Godric’s Hollow. An advance warning? Perhaps, but it didn’t seem to help.

This is literature, folks. The question we should be asking isn’t, “What makes the characters the most clever?” but rather, “What results in the most elegant pattern?” J.K. Rowling may prove me horribly wrong, but I think the answer involves a Severus Snape who isn’t just doing Dumbledore’s bidding.

If we accept my take on things, the biggest question is this: why does Severus Snape feel obligated to protect Harry Potter? Is this of his own accord, or is Snape unwillingly bound through something like an Unbreakable Vow or his outstanding debt to Harry’s father?

Harry will never pull off an Unforgivable Curse. And he’ll never be a murderer. It’s not even a matter of the amount of conviction or hatred he can pour into a spell meant to torture or kill – he’s just fundamentally incapable of the act. Sectumsempra is in all likelihood the closest he’ll ever come to the Dark Arts, and it was in many ways accidental. And this leads to the central curiosity I have going into the final volume: how could Harry vanquish Voldemort without murdering him?

Dumbledore’s dead. He’s been dead for two years now. Get over it.

Who lives? Limiting myself to candidates that may or may not have been bandied about, so I don’t have to comb the dramatis personae all the way down to Dedalus Diggle: Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Hagrid, all three of the Malfoys, all of the Weasleys (with the possible exception of Ron, but I’ll get into that later), Minerva McGonagall, Remus Lupin, the Dursleys.

Who dies? Lord Voldemort. His greatest weakness is his failure to realize that some things are worse than death, but I think that’s a reason why he will die, not why he won’t. It’s precisely the fate that all of his evil was conjured to avoid. There’s one hitch with this I can see: Voldemort is so resistant to death that theoretically, he’d come back as a ghost. There has to be some reason that his death is permanent, and it’s not going to be as simple as running out of Horcruxes. It probably involves love, but that doesn’t get us any closer to a practical solution, does it.

I’m actually inclined to think that all three of Harry, Ron and Hermione will survive. But I’ll hedge my bets and say that if one of them is going to bite the dust, it’s going to be Ron. It’s the chess game in Philosopher’s Stone that tips the balance. He has a clear arc of character development – individuation relative to his siblings and his best friend – that is reaching its saturation point. Really, what it might come down to is whether or not Rowling intends to rip him and Hermione apart just after they’ve finally gotten together.

If it’s not Ron, who will it be? We’re certain to lose someone near and dear to us, aren’t we? Who’s important enough?

Neville Longbottom, that’s who. I don’t say this on the basis of any evidence in particular, but here’s what we know. He has a score to settle with the Lestranges, that much is clear. There’s already a certain symmetry between Neville and Peter Pettigrew, and I could see a scenario in which the former takes the fall for his friends where the latter didn’t. After all, so much of the series is founded on taking similarities and splitting them in divergent directions at critical points marked by decisions that reflect one’s true character. And let’s not forget Neville’s role at the end of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, shall we?

Among the minor villains, I’m picking Bellatrix Lestrange, Peter Pettigrew and Fenrir Greyback to be out of the picture by the book’s end. Ever since Goblet of Fire, we’ve all been watching Peter Pettigrew to see what he’ll do with that silver hand, and a lot of the money’s on him killing Lupin. I actually think that if Pettigrew does slay a werewolf with a well-placed handshake, it will be Greyback; sure, the history between the characters isn’t there, but let’s not forget about that life debt to Harry.

What about Snape? I think he’s a dead man. Not at Harry’s hands, obviously. Harry will forgive and spare him. I can’t say the same for everyone else.

Ron will finally say the name “Voldemort.” And it’s about time.

Harry is not the last Horcrux. I admit the possibility, but I just don’t see it. This is a piece of Voldemort’s soul we’re talking about. If the Riddle diary was any indication, this is equivalent to an independent instance of Voldemort himself. We saw at the end of Order of the Phoenix that Voldemort is flatly unable to reside in someone who is able to love and be loved in the manner of Harry Potter. When Voldemort possessed Quirrell, he couldn’t even touch Harry with someone else’s hands because of the protection conferred by Harry’s mother. Is it really at all likely that Harry has played host to a shard of Voldemort’s soul this whole time? Not a chance.

The locket and the cup are probably givens. Some object of Ravenclaw’s? Probably, seeing as how there’s already one of Hufflepuff’s. If Dumbledore was wrong about any of the Horcruxes, it’s most likely the snake. But it’s not going to turn out to be Harry.

A brief word about R.A.B. It’s Regulus Black, but it might not be that important that it’s him. We should at least acknowledge, in passing, the possibility that Regulus was framed. For all we know, Snape could have been behind it all along. He had access to Grimmauld Place, he addresses Voldemort as the Dark Lord, he’s a known defector (genuine or otherwise), he’s proficient enough with potions that he could have filled or refilled the basin in the cave, and he is a likely candidate to attempt to subvert Voldemort from the inside. (We are, by now, well out of prediction territory and into the realm of fanciful conspiracy. My actual guess? It’s just Regulus Black.)

Someone we know or recognize will come back as an Inferius. And it will creep us out. But if you’re going to introduce a device like reanimated corpses into your story, why not use it?

Hoggy Hoggy Hogwarts. We’ll see more of it than we expect.

We will pay a visit to Azkaban. Of all the major locations mentioned in the books, Azkaban is the one we haven’t seen (Godric’s Hollow aside, but we know that’s coming). There’s a potential reason for going there, too: if Slytherin’s locket was indeed the one in Grimmauld Place, and Mundungus Fletcher indeed lifted it before being sent to the wizard prison, Harry will be hot on his trail.

The prophecy will be fulfilled, and it will be Voldemort’s fault. In other words, Harry lives and Voldemort dies. Voldemort’s is a case of Oedipal self-fulfilment par excellence. Is Divination still bunk? Yes, and it has always been. But Voldemort acts on its predictions, and has done so to his own peril on at least one occasion. That’s an exploitable trait if I ever saw one.

Sirius Black will not return as an innocent singing sensation. But they’ll finally clear his name.

The bad guys will get lucky. J.K. Rowling has proven time and again that any external utility or supplement that works in favour of the good guys can just as easily work in favour of the bad guys. She did it with Polyjuice Potion, the Invisibility Cloak, the Marauder’s Map and the Room of Requirement, and I strongly suspect Felix Felicis will fall into the wrong hands at some point. Then again, she does have limits; for example, she wrote the Time-Turner out of the story and avoided what could have been a very messy nest of Nargles.

We’ll see more of… Dobby, Kreacher, Luna Lovegood, Buckbeak, Grawp, Crabbe and Goyle, the huge and clumsy Death Eater at the end of Half-Blood Prince, the late Albus Dumbledore (who is unquestionably dead, but his portrait isn’t sitting in Hogwarts and who knows where else without reason). Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback? We can only hope. What’s Charlie Weasley been up to lately, anyhow?

We may have seen the last of… Moaning Myrtle, Firenze, Rita Skeeter, Cho Chang, Lavender Brown, Madame Maxime, Viktor Krum, Gilderoy Lockhart, Nearly Headless Nick, Peeves, Fawkes (who may have made his final exit alongside Dumbledore), and most of the Hogwarts staff. And again, Dumbledore is not just merely dead – he’s really, most sincerely dead.

Harry will live to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts. I may hold minority opinions on a number of things, but this is not one of them. This is Harry Potter’s most likely fate. Voldemort’s curse on the position is a fairly consequential subplot of its own; who better to break the pattern and restore a settling sense of natural order?

I think that’s all I can come up with for now. I will see you all on the other side, burdened with an inevitable case of post-Potter depression.

Mischief managed?

A July release date for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had been rumoured long before yesterday’s announcement, mostly because the prospect of the seventh Potter being released on 7/7/07 (as was often suggested) was too numerologically fortuitous to pass up. There were two reasons I never believed this: first, it coincided with the anniversary of the London tube bombings, and while I don’t like the idea that we’re effectively letting the terrorists win, I can understand the need for sensitivity.

More to the point, though, all indications were that Rowling wouldn’t finish in time. Books don’t get printed and shipped out as soon as they’re done: the fact that the date is now set to 21 July indicates that a complete draft is already in the can. I had no idea she was anywhere close to this. Settling on a title in December was probably the first indication that the book was coming along much faster than I expected, but even then, this is all rather sudden.

It’s encouraging, though. As was the case with The Prisoner of Azkaban, a quick turnaround time means things were tightly planned, things are going as planned, and the author isn’t struggling. It could make for a satisfying finale, to say the least.

By the way: while I have to read The Half-Blood Prince again before I commit to anything, my chips are still on “Harry is not a Horcrux,” “Snape is evil” and “Harry, Ron and Hermione all make it out alive.” All three of these positions are somewhat contrarian, and I wager I’m one of very few people to hold all of them at once, but we’ll see who’s eating crow come Saturday the 21st.

Next item on the agenda: Family Guy.

I make it no secret that I am not at all a fan of the show. In fact, I find it often irritating and outright dumb. After watching a few consecutive episodes one summer, it became readily apparent to me that however fresh it must have seemed back in its inaugural season, what passes for comedy on Family Guy amounts to a bag of three or four basic tricks.

I’m not going to get into details here. I tried once, but I couldn’t get to the end. Just read this guy and pay special attention to #9, #7, #3 and #2. And just know that the moment the show lost me for good was when I realized it didn’t even know how to make a decent jab at The Da Vinci Code.

I only bring up Family Guy now because for all its failings, the one element that never ceases to impress me is the music, be it the nostalgic sitcom cues or the full-blown musical numbers. Sure, like the rest of the show, most of them are merely referential and not parodic, which means that they can be cute, but not necessarily funny. I know at least one person who only knew the great Lerner/Loewe tune “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from Seth McFarlane doing Stewie doing Rex Harrison in one of Family Guy‘s more triumphant moments, and not from My Fair Lady; I’m sure he’s not alone.

So what do we make of this: taking the scene from Anchors Aweigh where Gene Kelly dances with the latter half of Tom and Jerry as a palimpsestic surface, so now we have Gene Kelly dancing with Stewie Griffin?

Personally, I find it quite enjoyable, and probably as good as the show is ever prone to get. In fact, Family Guy is generally a lot more tolerable when snipped into little sketches and segments that are placed online. This is one of its better moments, even if it reeks of the problem I mentioned earlier – that the show can’t tell the difference between reference and parody, and often settles for the former.

But as fun as it may be, Steve Worth is on point: “How much ‘thought to animation and choreography’ does it take to rotoscope someone else’s animation and slap your own character over the top of it?… Family Guy deserves no praise for this. A ripoff is a ripoff.”

Then again, even a ripoff is linguistically interesting from time to time.

As an aside, I started sketching this post in my undergraduate class on the philosophy of mind, and it’s slowly dawning on me just how little most people know about computers. I think it’s a problem, at a basic conceptual level, that the average layman wraps his head around computers as if they were only machines that are or aren’t powerful enough to do certain things, and not as theoretical, mathematical constructions – which, when it comes to a philosophical approach to consciousness, is the part that matters.

Generally, this is probably a consequence of the fact that most people’s exposure to science is limited to an exposure to technology. Consequently, it must be easy for them to fall into the trap of thinking that scientific problems, or philosophical ones with scientific elements, can be solved by technological progress alone.

First of all, the tombstone in the graveyard scene has been fixed. Early promotional images such as this one revealed an egregious error – that is, the presumption that Tom Marvolo Riddle’s dead father was also named Tom Marvolo Riddle, which was from the outset more improbable than the transfiguration of a pair of missiles into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias, and then flatly contradicted by events critical to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Near the end of this trailer there are a few shots from the resurrection in the graveyard (like I said, it shows everything), and the inscription has been corrected.

Much more irritating than anything else – and I suspect this will end up being my greatest annoyance with the finished product when I see it in November – is Dumbledore’s butchered pronunciation of “Beauxbatons”, which is similar to how they pronounce “Baton Rouge” in the drawl of the former Confederate states. Seriously, William the Conqueror died for this? Oh well – I suppose they already neglected to drop the silent T in “Voldemort”, so all bets are off. Now we’ll just have to deal with the premise that a Bulgarian kid learns how to enunciate Hermione’s name but the only one You-Know-Who ever feared stumbles over his French after a century of practice. What would really be upsetting is if the francophone characters do the same.

Like Cuaron’s flying Iceman Dementors in The Prisoner of Azkaban, there are a lot of neat visual inventions on display – Mad-Eye Moodyvision, Sirius Black speaking in the form of the embers in the fire instead of a disembodied head (which makes me wonder what will be done if they keep the scene of Umbridge fumbling about for his presence in Phoenix), and the rippling Jumbotron at the Quidditch World Cup, to name a few. I can see plenty of dynamism befitting the scope of the tale, a pulse that was sorely lacking in the Columbus films. Now that we have a pretty clear idea of the look of the film, the big question mark is the pace.

One of the ancillary benefits of writing about the new Harry Potter book when all the major fan websites and discussion forums are closed for spoiler protection, as was the case last weekend, is that you appear very high in the Google charts for a day or two, and blog traffic jumps twentyfold as if it just had a run-in with a Great American Jackalope. It seems that being on topic, even be it in a disorganized splitter-splatter that you forgot to sweep under the rug before eight hundred uninvited guests crash your dinner party (and your little server, too!), gives SEO scammers the old one-two any day of the week.

I do have some sober second thoughts to offer about Regulus Black, soul-eating lockets, double-crossing Potions profs and the proper care and feeding of a Blast-Ended Skrewt in light of the myriad observations brought to my attention by respondents in the comment box and via e-mail, but not now. But lest thee think the rest of this post is a mistake, it will commence with my talking Potter once more.

Colby Cosh, I’m told, is a somewhat prominent journalist from this neck of the woods whose blog sports a clean wordmark banner in oblique serifs and middleweight traffic to match. Last week he wrote an article for the National Post which basically amounts to “nobody’s going to remember J.K. Rowling decades from now” and 877 words of eloquent padding.

I wish Mr. Cosh the best of luck in beating back the torrential downpour of hate mail, predominantly written by impulsive illiterates that drown out the level-headed critics, that descends from the heavens whenever a writer with a megaphone attacks something popular that may or may not be spectacularly good (and in this case, I think it is). Words of advice that I feel are appropriate here: draco dormiens nunquam titillandus, kiddo.

As for my part in all this – well, given how resident Anglophile Sarah and something-else-ophile Roman have both given the piece a mention, both very much in their own fashions, I couldn’t possibly remain left out.

There’s honestly not much to respond to, though, so this will be short and won’t even require me to speak of the Potter series’ lasting virtues and pervasive universals, of which I think there are many. Cosh’s syllogism, once you uproot the Opinion-page flower garden, amounts to: a) Some incredibly popular authors from the early twentieth century have since been forgotten; b) J.K. Rowling is an incredibly popular author; 3) therefore, J.K. Rowling will be forgotten within the century.

Allow me to introduce you to ∈. My little buddy ∈ is, in set theory, the “is a member of the set” symbol. Yes, sales figures show that Ms. Rowling ∈ the set of incredibly popular authors. Where, though, is it demonstrated that Rowling ∈ the set of forgettable popular authors who don’t outlive their press and contemporaneous relevance?

Okay, I’m not playing fair. You can’t demonstrate such a thing because it hasn’t happened yet, and any claims either way are predictive. But then let’s work by comparison, as Cosh does, and answer his rhetorical question: “What blind god bestows immortality on some authors and consigns others to oblivion?” And just to show that I mean business, a few paragraphs down I’m going to pull out my 3/3, Flying, Trample Raymond Chandler.

The problem with the comparisons drawn in the article is that there are better ones from the same time period, the early twentieth century – not marginally, but significantly better.

Take Agatha Christie, for instance – nobody special, just the bestselling prose author of all time. Like Rowling, her writing has a characteristic, well-mannered British flavour that appeals to the good Anglophile, not just on the level of form, but also on the level of content for the millions who consume it in translation. Like Rowling, her world is a complex construction populated by an assortment of eccentrics that challenge the starring sleuths at every turn; but it is a cozy world where ultimately, the clues and answers draw more attention than the inciting murders do. And like Rowling, she’s a woman, but we’ll not get into that.

The criticisms of either author’s modus operandi run along similar lines: that their stories lounge on chesterfields too comfy to be threatening and thus too unreal to be believable, that instead of doing something wholly original they solo off the leadsheets of others who quaff the same formulae and choose to impress with meticulousness.

Raymond Chandler, noted inventor of the simile-spouting private eye narrator archetype, wrote a seminal critique of the twentieth-century detective story, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944 and entitled “The Simple Art of Murder”. (You can see a slightly off-angle PDF scan here, but it is often reproduced in print with a collection of short stories.) Read the essay, as it is one of the most important things ever written about mystery. In it, he writes that the detective story is some of the most difficult fiction to concoct, yet it is at the same time very easily publishable:

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average – or only slightly above average – detective story does… And the strange thing is that this average, more than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction is really not very different from what are called the masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dialogue is a shade grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvious. But it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel.

Chandler goes on in this manner and responds to what today, in hindsight, we refer to as the Christie Cozy – the clue-scrubbing deductive puzzles that invariably miss some critical insurer of plausibility beneath all their intricate workmanship. Some of the authors he glosses over in this deliberation – E.C. Bentley, Freeman Wills Crofts, A.A. Milne – we don’t hear much of anymore, at least not in conjunction with mystery. I suppose we still know who Milne is, but that’s because of his kids’ stuff like Winnie the Pooh and not The Red House Mystery. (This will become important.)

So if the detective stories of the day were all chips off the same block, why is Christie synonymous with everything that followed Arthur Conan Doyle? Chandler answers this, but not directly. In rebuking Dorothy L. Sayers for her statement that mysteries, of which she was herself a prolific writer, were intrinsically second-class escapist literature, Chandler goes on to praise Dashiell Hammett and his first-class The Maltese Falcon for introducing gritty gangland realism as the remedy. But observe:

How original a writer Hammett really was it isn’t easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group – the only one who achieved critical recognition – who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway.

His argument is, in effect, that authors are not remembered for originating as much as they are remembered for exemplifying. Once the sort of detective fiction that Philip Marlowe’s creator wrote of passed into history, Agatha Christie became the era’s flagbearer by way of such exemplification.

I do not know if, at the time, Chandler realized that his own work would be regarded one day as the culmination of something that Hammett began – the mythos of the quintessential American gumshoe. His work is representative. So, as we shall see, is Rowling’s.

Where Rowling and Christie diverge is that only the former traverses two other spheres that often intersect. The first is children’s fiction, and the second is fantasy.

Good children’s fiction – the kind that adults go back and read – is notoriously unclassifiable. Often, the subject matter resonates far beyond the the confines of the single-digit Flesch reading level, and one is reluctant to call them children’s stories at all for fear that the term is disparaging and exclusionary. Let’s dispense with this in a hurry. Yes, adults read Harry Potter. I read Harry Potter. University professors, God bless them, teach and study Harry Potter. They’re still children’s novels, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Unlike mysteries, here we deal with authors who write for an audience that doesn’t concern itself with realism simply because it doesn’t have a lot of real-world fact-checking to fall back on. Also unlike mysteries, “children’s lit” is not a genre, since its distinguishing mark is an attribute of form, not content. In contrast, Chandler’s statement that good and bad mysteries fundamentally tell the same stories is an extension of genre defined as fluid form that bubbles around a solid content core, including (but not limited to) a murder and a bowl of petunias.

What we do have, though, is an existing system for passing fiction down from one generation to the next.

How is it that people discover what books to read, anyway? Word-of-mouth recommendations, certainly; bookshop browsing, bestseller lists, movie deals, and allusions from without; in fact, it’s all kind of erratic in a spotty kind of way, which is why it is only in very special cases that everybody reads the same book.

Children’s fiction is the huge exception. Standard curricula, Scholastic book orders, well-read teachers (if you’re lucky) and the active encouragement of doing any reading at all unite with the result of having people read the same books in droves, or at least become aware of them likewise. A lot of books are lost in history because nobody told their kids to read them, and those kids went off and either developed their own tastes, or tragically stopped reading them outright. But the ilk of Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum and yes, A.A. Milne receive a proper introduction. These books are inherited, as they are easy to leave as cultural inheritance. Without a doubt, Harry Potter ∈ this corpus.

Finally, we turn to the realm of fantasy, which returns us to the generic distinctions assessed of mystery. Just as J.K. Rowling’s brand of sleuthing hearkens back to the Christie Cozy that has long gone out of fashion in mainstream detective writing, Harry Potter marks another sort of representative culmination. It drew adult readers back to the kind of serial fairytale where Magic is fun and (relatively) innocent. Whereas the post-Tolkien “adult fantasy” experiments have drifted off in the opposite direction, churning out paperbacks thicker than they are wide burdened with unpronounceably apostrophic nomenclature, the ever-English Potter breathes some life back into the spellwork of forces good and evil.

History has shown that this is the sort of life that lasts, and I am confident that Rowling’s importance will prove to be historical. A series of books that is this popular, and more importantly, this emblematic, will affect both writing patterns and reading patterns until the Next Big Thing that steps up to bat in the selfsame ballpark – which may not be anything new, but is certain to be the next ripple in a long wave of ripples, the indicator of its precedent’s subsidence.

Rowling works in genres, and a plurality of them at that. Moreover, they are genres that are aware of their own history, and the works of the present propel authors forward, authors who grab new readers by the collar and pull them right back. Cosh’s examples of writers who have faded into obscurity – Harold Bell Wright, Jeffrey Farnol and the American Winston Churchill – dabbled primarily in the historical and the modern, not genres in themselves, where the subject is in flux and there is little propagative continuity in stylistic influences.

I am not saying that novels outside of genre are far less likely to survive; that kind of claim presumes a consistent system to produce a bell of fiction that never stops ringing, and none exists, for physicists have yet to discover the resonant frequencies of written words. But one must admit that Rowling has certain advantages, since she’s more than an author: she’s a movement. Really now, it’s hard to name an author working today who is more thoroughly guaranteed to take the fast-track to English lit’s pantheon.

I suggest that Mr. Cosh take on a certain Dan Brown. There, his argument about press-driven momenta apply just fine, and Brown makes for much easier pickings.