Harry Potter readers have been given a wealth of information in supplemental books, interviews with J.K. Rowling, and posts on Rowling’s official website: information we use to help in our understanding of the books and the world Rowling has created and to try to solve mysteries in the books’ plots, and much information that we enjoy simply for its own sake. According to currently dominant literary theory, however, “the author is dead,” and we ought not to be listening to a writer talk about her own books, much less letting her influence how we read and understand those books. Will J.K. Rowling’s communications to us outside of her books have a lasting effect on the interpretation and estimation of her works, or will her words have no long-term impact, as modern literary theory demands and predicts? That battle is being fought right now, and we – all of us – are in the thick of it.

 

The “Death” of the Author

 

Much of the excitement of the last sixty years in literary theory and literary criticism has been about the proper relationship between authors, the texts they write, and the readers who read the texts. In 1946, in an influential essay called “The Intentional Fallacy,” two critics named William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley argued that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” ¹ They further stated:

 

The poem is […] not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.²

 

This general idea was expressed in more vivid terms by Roland Barthes in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author”: “we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.” ³ Or, as the concept is more commonly expressed: the author is dead.

 

Of course, the proponents of this idea – and there are many of them, as this is a dominant idea in current literary theory – are not so foolish as to literally believe that authors are zombies, or that they drop dead the moment they finish writing. But they do believe that in terms of having anything useful or helpful to say about their own works, authors might as well be dead. The only intention of the author that counts is what is contained in the text, as understood by readers who interact with it. Any interpretation the author might care to share about his or her own works is, at best, no more relevant than the interpretation of any other reader. Or, to put it in proper literary jargon, the author’s intent is not privileged above other interpretations. (I hope that Wimsatt, Beardsley, Barthes, et al expressed themselves clearly in their original essays, because anything they might have tried to explain later would, by their own precepts, be irrelevant in determining the meaning of what they wrote.)

 

It is generally agreed that the author’s role is finished when the work is completed and published. After that point, the text must speak for itself – or, at the most, those few remaining critics who have not altogether abandoned authorial intent might ask the author to clarify what he or she intended (note the past tense) by including certain elements in the text. The writer’s contribution is frozen at the point of time that he or she finished writing.

 

But it seems that nobody has informed the authors of that. Authors, being people, have responses to their own works and they also have responses to the readers who read their works. Just as readers and critics judge authors by how they write, writers judge readers by how they read, and critics by how they criticize. Authors may change their feelings and beliefs about their own work after seeing how the audience responds to it. Many authors are disposed to defend their work against criticism, answer questions, clarify what they see as misunderstandings, and in general do whatever they think will help to enhance reader enjoyment and guide critical discussion into what they see as fruitful paths.

 

It is no use to say that authors ought not to do this; the fact is that they do do this, have always done so, and probably always will. One might argue that readers and critics ought not to listen to them, but the fact is that whether we respond with uncritical acceptance, scornful disagreement, or something in between, we generally do listen. One might argue that these author outpourings are ephemeral and future generations will have the opportunity to confront the text in a pure and untainted form, but in fact many of these post-textual authorial contributions are preserved and handed down. We know that Jane Austen said that Pride and Prejudice was “light and bright and sparkling,” ⁴ that J.R.R. Tolkien insisted that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory,⁵ and that William Wordsworth said poetry ought to be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” from “emotions recollected in tranquility.” ⁶ It is hard to calculate how much these authorial comments and others like them might have influenced our collective understanding of these authors’ works, but it would be very surprising if they have had no effect at all. The very fact that the words are still remembered and discussed argues otherwise.

 

In this context, we can regard J.K. Rowling’s communications with her readers in interviews and question-and-answer sessions, in the two supplemental books, and on her own website as part of an ongoing struggle for control over how the Harry Potter books will be read and understood. Not acknowledging that she is “dead,” not accepting that her opinions about her own books are considered to be inapplicable and irrelevant in most modern literary theories, not being content to send her books out into the world and otherwise keep her mouth shut, J.K. Rowling uses the tools at her command – creativity, humor, and her absolutely unique knowledge about the world she has created – to guide and shape how readers (and critics) respond to her works. This essay will examine how that works.

 

Why the Author Speaks

 

In brazen defiance of the Intentional Fallacy, I am going to speculate on what motivates J.K. Rowling to give information to her fans outside the books. I suspect that if we asked her, Rowling would say that she gives information to her fans primarily because they want it. Every day she must receive dozens or hundreds of letters brimming with questions and requests. Reporters want to interview her. Her publishers and agent probably encourage her to “do publicity” – why sell only 22 million copies of a book when with a little more effort from the author you can sell 25 million? It is easy to imagine that to her it seems like the world at large is constantly demanding that she give us more information about her books.

 

The situation is complicated by the Harry Potter series being a work in progress, even though each published individual book is a finished work. Readers anxious to know what will happen next and eagerly seeking clues to solve a mystery will naturally ask even more questions than readers of a self-contained finished work. And even those literary theorists who most resolutely avoid the intentional fallacy will admit that while a writer’s intention may be irrelevant in interpreting her finished work, it is certainly not irrelevant when it comes to what she will write next. For most of us, receiving clarification about exactly what Rowling meant in the first six books is not simply a matter of interest; it is something we feel we need to fuel our speculations, form our theories, feed our hopes, and calm our fears about the seventh book.

 

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The Sorting Hat, Ideology, and Free Will

By Emily Bytheway

 

In 1969, Neo-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser published an essay entitled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in which he proposed a new way of looking at the concept of ideology. Although Marxist literary criticism has largely gone out of style, concepts such as Althusser’s are still relevant and can still be applied to texts both old and new. A text which invites such criticism is the Harry Potter novel series by J.K. Rowling. While much could be said of the ideology of the wizarding world at large in these novels, as well as the ideology of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in particular, this essay will focus on the way in which the house system, including the school Sorting Hat, functions as an Ideological State Apparatus, and ramifications of this idea, particularly as they apply to Harry Potter, Sirius Black, and Tom Riddle.

 

Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses

 

Merriam-Webster’s 11^th Collegiate Dictionary defines ideology as “a systematic body of concepts, especially about human life or culture.” ¹ Althusser, however, defines it quite differently. “Ideology,” he says, “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” ² The conditions of our existence are irrefutable. I, as a student, pay my university a lot of money so that I can do homework, write essays, attend sometimes-boring lectures, and take exams. I work at an unfulfilling job for which I am dismally overqualified, making far too little money, in order to afford this. Yet my ideology says that I am getting an education, which is both a privilege and a blessing. The work I do is not terribly enjoyable, but it is important, and my coworkers are nice, so the job is one worth keeping. Thus I am contented with my lot, and continue to be a productive member of society (if you can call being an English graduate student being a productive member of society, that is). Another example might be in the ideology of teaching. The reality of teaching is not very appealing. You spend long hours each day attempting to hammer knowledge into the heads of unenthusiastic students. Most of the time your position is one of glorified babysitter. In addition to eight hours each day of class time, you usually arrive early and leave late, and still have to bring work home. You are required to take additional classes for “continuing education” purposes, even after you have obtained your degree and license, and are often required to take exams to prove your competence. And to top it all off, you have to deal with parents who cannot understand why their children are not absolutely perfect in every way, and who blame you for any fault in their students’ performance. And for all this you get paid next to nothing. Yet your ideology, which has been instilled in you both as a student yourself and in your teacher training courses, tells you that teaching is the noblest profession in the world, that nothing is more important than educating our children and securing our future, and that the intangible rewards of teaching more than compensate for the low pay. This ideology, however, is not seen as such by the person who lives it. To them it is merely reality. It is, in fact, not only difficult but nearly impossible for any of us to identify our own ideologies as such. It is generally only from the outside that ideologies may be analyzed, which is why we often find ourselves investigating the ideologies depicted in literature rather than attempting to examine our own.

 

Creating and reproducing an ideology is the easiest way for a State to keep the populace in line, and for the state to reproduce the means of keeping itself solvent (what Althusser terms “the means of production”).³ It is not the only way, however. Althusser’s theory allows for two ways to control the populace and reproduce the means of production: the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). In each State there is only one RSA, which contains “the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc.,” and which belongs entirely to the public sphere.⁴ The primary means the RSA uses to control the populace is violence, although it does employ ideology as a secondary means of control.⁵ By contrast, there are many ISAs, including things like religion, education, family, communications, and the arts.⁶ ISAs may be either public or private, and, as their name implies, function primarily by ideology. Their job is to reproduce the ideology of the State in the populace, so that citizens remain functioning and productive members of society. It is actually through the means of the ISAs rather than the RSA that the most successful societies reproduce themselves. These ISAs allow an ideology to be lived rather than simply believed, thus giving the ideology a material existence.

 

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