I mean, that's all we get, except for this shot. But since there's nothing to contradict this in the books, who's to say you can't read them this way too? The final sentence of Bart's essay argues not only for the death of the author, but also for the birth of the reader. Bart says meanings are created not when the author writes a text, but when the reader reads it. If a text is written in the woods and there's nobody around to read it, does it still mean anything? Again, I cannot claim to know why Potomania happened. But I think one thing that definitely worked in its favor is that there's plenty of scope for reader interpretation. There's a lot of stuff in Potter. There's a ton of characters, a rich cocktail of folklore and fairy tale, a contradictory climate of beliefs, as well as a lot of details hinted at, but never expanded upon. As a result, Potter can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Potter became the phenomenon it did, not solely because of the meanings Joanne intentionally put into it, but also because of the meanings readers found and brought to it. Okay, but reinterpreters are readers too. The meanings they find are just as valid. But so long as we're killing the author, there's another reader interpretation that's just as relevant.
{# E23 (Nick, ruling section 1 answer 10): quoting a bill or a court opinion works
the way quoting a news article works. Select a passage above and the same panel
opens: the passage goes to the official you choose, with this document's own
address as its source and its own type. #}