What Does Harry Potter Mean Now? [105:56-111:00]

So perhaps the way the fandom survives is to ignore the author, and instead rewrite these stories for ourselves, create our own preferred canon by salvaging the ideas we like and discarding those we don't. Is it possible we can steal Potter back from Joanne? No. I mean, more power to these fake writers? By all means we should try and reclaim Potter's queerer and more progressive meanings, but there has never been an author so connected to her books. Once the Potomania fire was lit, it was fueled in part by Joanne's rags-to-riches story, the captivating idea of J.K. Rowling, the single mother on benefits whose charming book about a boy wizard made her a multi-millionaire. And while that's a true story, it's also been fictionalised, simplified, dramatised as part of the Potter mythology. In Suman Gupta's book, rereading Harry Potter, he draws a distinction between Joanne Rowling, the real-life human, and J.K. Rowling, the capital A author, arguing it's the latter who bears responsibility for her work. Joanne may have physically written the books, but when we read them, J.K. is the one we attribute them to. J.K. is the one we know from press or interviews, or simply from imagining her voice when we read her words. As such, Gupta says the real-life author is irrelevant, with one condition. Those questions might become relevant if the real-life Rowling did or does anything to clash with a constructed author Rowling. Yeah, I think she might have. Gupta wrote this in 2003, and it's chilling to read now. He was confident the real-life Joanne would have no trouble living up to an idea as mild-mannered and admirable as J.K. Rowling. The mythology of Rowling as the constructed author is a quieter one. It is that of a woman, a mother, a lover of children, a charitable person who is seen to write as such. It would take a very old-fashioned and hard-and-thatcher right-tory to find herself caught out by the mythologised author, who is a single mother on the doll and made good and became one of the richest and most famous persons in Britain. You had one job, Joanne. You couldn't just log off. So J.K. Rowling is dead because Joanne Rowling killed her. It's not just that Joanne's current politics contradict Potter's message, it's that now we know J.K. Rowling didn't write these books. The reason the reinterpretation exists is to figure out who did. But Joanne is just as much a construct as J.K. was. The reinterpretation is imagining a new capital A author to replace the old one, which comes with a lot of the same problems. The true story of Joanne is also fictionalised, simplified and dramatised. But then that's just how we read. Killing the author is impossible. Sure, we can try and read Potter as if we found it in a time capsule from another universe without Joanne. But whenever we read a text, even if we know nothing about the person who wrote it, we still know somebody wrote it. We're still communicating with someone. The reader may be the one who creates meanings, but we can't do that without also creating some version of the author. So, if our understanding of an author changes, our understanding of their work can't help but change with them. A text doesn't exist independently of the language, media and culture which surrounds it. Both J.K. and Joanne are part of that culture. Even though the literal text hasn't changed, what these books mean has. That's why this feels icky to read now. The contradictions, the essentialism, the systemic injustices are harder to overlook. The message of anti-bigotry is harder to explain when you know these are the words of an actual bigot. In my opinion, you cannot disconnect these books from who Joanne is and what Joanne does. It sucks, but the meaning of Potter is always going to be tainted by her. But that also doesn't mean our original interpretations were wrong. Back when J.K. was still alive and well, that was the common reading. There were always contradictions and problematic ideas which were and are worth discussing. But we, as readers, decided this was a story about love and acceptance for those who are different. So that is what it meant. And those meanings don't just go away, now we've found new ones. A lot of reinterpreters reassure their audience that it's okay to have complicated feelings about Potter, but I'll go one further. It's not only okay, it's correct. You should have complicated feelings about it. The meaning of Potter has become complicated.