J. K. Rowling is Wrong about Dumbledore: Why the creator of Harry Potter doesn't know what she is talking about

J. K. Rowling is wrong. Albus Dumbledore is not gay.

How, you ask, can someone say that? Hasn't Rowling herself, the author of the Harry Potter books--albeit in a fit of political correctness, and to a New York City crowd--pronounced the venerable wizard, Headmaster of the Hogwarts School for Wizardry and Witchcraft, ... well, a switch-hitter? They are her characters, after all. Can't she do with them as she pleases? If Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, then gay he is: right?

Wrong.

Rowling made the remarks to a crowd of fans at Carnegie Hall, who were there to hear more about their favorite children's literary character. And in addition to the revelation about Dumbledore's heretofore unknown monoclinousness, Rowling apparently threw in a few politically correct moralisms.

It is a long established principle in literary criticism that once the author has released his work upon the world, the story is as much the reader's as the author's. In their 1954 book, The Verbal Icon, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley authored an essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy," in which they pointed out the problem with the idea that a work of art should be judged on the basis of the author's intent. In the same volume, they penned another article, called "The Affective Fallacy", which took on the opposite error--that a work is to be judged by one's subjective reaction to it.

A work of literature is not what the author intended nor what the reader sees in it. It is what it is. Neither the reader nor the author has any privileged status in judging the meaning or assessing the characters. The only basis on which to interpret a piece of literature is on the basis of what it says.

Does it say anywhere in the Harry Potter books that Dumbledore holds the dictates of biology in low esteem? I have posed this question to a Harry Potter expert. A person who has read all of the books--several times. A person so steeped in Potter lore that he can tell you which spell is for what, and what original Latin expression it comes from. A person who, when his mother looked out of her kitchen window some two or three Halloweens ago, was beheld prancing around the back yard in a dark robe casting spells on every thing within notice (much, we are fairly certain, to the horror of the Baptist pastor who lived next door).

He is my 12 year old son. The youngest of my young 'uns. I caught him idle one day (not an uncommon occurrence), munching on an ice cream sandwich. I asked him, "Tell me," I said, "is Dumbledore gay?" "No," he said, between bites. "That's stoopid."

There you go.

Now the thing is, his opinion on this topic is every bit as authoritative as Rowling's. In fact, it might be even more so. It is a common notion that a reader can often see more in a story than the author intended. J. R. R. Tolkien said as much about his books, and William Golding once remarked about the fact that readers of The Lord of the Flies had been able to glean things from the book that he, the author, never knew were there. If it is possible for a reader to see more in a story than the author intended, then it must a fortiori be possible for a reader to see less.

Rowling also advised her audience during the Carnegie Hall appearance that they should "question authority". Well, now we are questioning hers. If Rowling had intended for Dumbledore to be gay (and it wasn't an afterthought, as I think more likely), then she left the intention inside her head (where it should have remained) and it never made it into the story.

From now on Rowling ought to keep her thoughts about Harry Potter to herself. She obviously doesn't know what she is talking about.

Note: As I go to press with this little piece, I catch on my feed reader an article with the title I had intended to use, and which made many of the same observations I make here: "Dumbledore is not Gay: Taking Stories More Seriously than the Author." I'm hoping it is because great minds think alike.

Subverting the Subversives

The June issue of the New Criterion has an excellent article by Roger Kimball called, "Why the Art World is Such a Disaster." He discusses "Wrestle," a new exhibition at Bard College to inaugurate the CCS Bard Hessel Museum, one of numerous such efforts over the last several decades that takes as its premise that the purpose of art is to shock and outrage rather than to create something beautiful.

The problem is that shock and outrage is, well, so yesterday. Kimball explains:

Don't get me wrong: it was plenty awful. Body parts, "explicit" images, and naughty language galore. The exhibition certainly merited the warning to parents at the entrance. But it wasn't worse than dozens of other exhibitions I've seen, you've seen, we've all seen.

He continues:

No, the thing to appreciate about "Wrestle," about the Hessel Museum and the collection of Marieluese Hessel, and about the visual arts at Bard generally is not how innovative, challenging, or unusual they are, but how pedestrian and , sad to say, conventional they are. True, there is a lot of ickiness on view at the Hessel Museum. But it is entirely predictable ickiness. It's outrage by-the-yard, avant-garde in bulk, smugness for the masses. And this brings me to what I believe is the real significance of institutions like the art museum at Bard, the Hessel collection that fills it, and the surrounding atmosphere of pseudo-avant-garde self-satisfaction. The "arts" at Bard are notable not because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly ordinary.

I think these people seriously think that we're all going to faint when we see this stuff for the umpteenth time in its most recent derivative incarnation. These people don't need to be met with cries of protest, they need to be met with a collective yawn. But such is the state, not only of our artists (if I may use that term loosely), but of our universities which apparently have nothing else better to do, now that they've given up on passing on Western culture, than to tear it down.

Although he doesn't mention Chesterton directly, Kimball recognizes what Chesterton spoke of in the introduction to Heretics, where he points out that heresy is essentially boring. Everyone is a heretic now. The subversives have taken over. It's time to subvert them. If you want to strike out on your own, if you want to be different, if you want to revolt, about the only thing to revolt into is orthodoxy.

Someone needs to tell these people the 60's are over. Yoohoo! Jerry Garcia is dead. So's Timothy Leary. Turn off, tune out, drop in. Or, perhaps preferably, go somewhere and don't bother people with your ludicrous attempts to bother people. It's getting very old.

Spielbergia: What Steven Spielberg means to American culture

There is a fascinating article on the relevance of Steven Spielberg's movies to American Culture at The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Another modern art outrage

G. K. Chesterton once said that all art involves "drawing aline somewhere." Some art critics are wanting to draw the line somewhere this side ofa a new exhibition at the Chapter Art Centre in Cardiff, England, where, according to the Daily Mail, a new exhibition that features, well, nothing. Artist Simon Pope says visitors to the empty exhibit hall are to use the opportunity to remember exhibitions at another museum. "You are asked to summon up these remote spaces - through memory, body, speech and movement - so that they exist at two locations simultaneously, both here and there."

Hmmm.

Pope says the exhibition is to foster a greater awareness of psychosis by putting visitors in the frame of mind of someone suffering from "reduplicative paramnesia," a "rare delusional belief that a place or location has been duplicated, existing in more than one place simultaneously, or that it has been 'relocated' to another site."

This has not a few visitors accusing Pope of engaging in a practical joke. Maybe they should put stops on the checks they used to pay to enter the exhibit and ask the museum to "imagine" that the checks are good.

And museums wonder why it's so hard to find funding.

Is Ugly really only Skin Deep?

A response to Gina Alfonso at the new and very good blog The Point, on whether the new television series, "Ugly Betty," is an indication of a healthy reacknowledgement of realism in the media or a further indication of what Richard Weaver calls the "failure to make distinctions." Gina argued the former. I wonder if, in fact, it is the latter:
Gina,

I'm not sure I agree with you here. It seems to me that there is a lot of ugliness in the media and popular culture these days--all mixed in together with the less ugly. Look at cartoon animation anymore, where bad drawing seems to be the standard.

Couldn't we as easily say that the fact that in movies like Suspicion, beautiful women were cast preciselyl because they were beautiful, and that there was some acknowledgement that beauty in fact existed and was clearly distinguishable from ugliness?

Maybe what you call "realism" is really just part and paracel of the modern failure to acknowledge any clear distinction between beauty and ugliness, just as there is a failure to acknowledge a distinction between truth and falsehood, and good and evil.

Just a thought.

By the way I have also posted this at my own blog, http://www.vereloqui.blogspot.com.

Is There Such a Thing as the "American Way"?

In the recent "Superman Returns" movie, the mention of "the American Way" was apparently too politically incorrect to include in Superman's traditional formulation: "Truth, Justice, and the American Way". Instead, the best the editor of the Daily Planet (played by Frank Langela) could do was, "Truth, Justice, and all that other stuff."

When I posted this on another blog, it attracted at least two comments that voiced the skepticism only inherent in the newspaper editor's modified formula. The question those commenting seemed to be asking was, "Is there such a thing as the American Way worth mentioning in the first place?"

This seems to me a very important question, and one to which there is a definite answer.

Of course there is an "American Way", and of course it is worthy of mention. I would say furthermore, that, if there is not, we are all in deep trouble.

I think that the failure to see this is the result of a deep confusion in what a nation, or polity, is, and what our role as Christians is in it. It is a matter I think, of primary loyalty. The concept of a "primary loyalty" is one which few people can articulate, but all possess.

What is a "primary loyalty"? A primary loyalty is a commitment we must have to a thing, and it is a loyalty over which we have no choice and may not even be aware. It is not the result of any commitment we may have consciously made or that we can even escape from. It is something we are born to, in addition to being born into. There are various primary loyalties in our lives. Our family is one of them. If we are Christians, our membership in the covenant community of God is another. Another primary loyalty is that to our community.

When we are born into our family, we take on commitments and responsibilities from which we cannot escape. They are ours by virtue of condition over which we have no control. They are ours whether we wish to accept them or not. When we are told in the Ten Commandments, for example, that we are to honor our father and our mother, we cannot escape the responsibilities of this command by saying that we had no input into who our father and mother were.

Likewise, when we are born into the Church, and are given the sign and seal of this membership in infancy (Baptism), we are shouldered with commitments that are ours regardless of our acceptance of this later in life.

I submit that citizenship is the same kind of primary loyalty as these. If I decide to go 70 mph in a 35 mph zone, and the nice highway patrolman takes me aside and asks why I was going too fast, I cannot say to him that, yes, I saw the sign, but that I had no choice in having been born into a society that sees the limitation of speed as important. I cannot say, "I never committed to following the law, and am therefore not culpable for complying with it."

I can't say that I simply disagree with the laws or with the Constitution or with the current political leadership and expect to be free of the responsibilities that are mine by virtue of my natural citizenship. There are commitments that are mine simply by virtue of my being born into them. There is civil authority (ordained by God, if Paul is an authority on the matter, which he is) that I come under, whether I like it or not.

G. K. Chesterton, in his book, Orthodoxy, takes this point a bit further, and points to another primary loyalty: that to the universe itself--to reality. And he uses the idea of citizenship as the very analog to this:

If a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it ... To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

...My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty.

The feeling I sense in the comments to the post I mentioned before, in which the American Way (let's take the double quotations off of that phrase so that we do not demean it) is somehow implicated in the fact that there are things about our country that are very obviously wrong. There are things that we do not want to endorse when we confess our commitment to an American Way.

If we say that we are for the American Way, are we not making ourselves complicit in all of the wrongs of our country? Well, we could ask a similar question: If we say that we are committed to our family, are we not making ourselves complicit in all of the wrongs of our family?

Aren't the answers to these two questions the same? I think they clearly are. The answer is, "Of course not." Chesterton says that we can say, "My country, right or wrong," as long as we can say it in the same sense as we might say, "My mother, drunk or sober." There is a primary commitment involved in both cases, one we cannot escape.

Chesterton again:

The world is not a lodging-house in Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.

Is this not also true of our country? We love these things--our family, our country, God--Chesterton would add reality--"with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason."

"Men did not love Rome because she was great," he says, "She was great because they had loved her."

If we cannot say this about America, then I think we are in a pitiable state. We have repudiated a primary loyalty. We can repudiate it, but we cannot escape it.

This being the case, what is the American Way? I submit that it is the same thing as Russell Kirk refers to as the "American Cause" (I use the double quotes here only to introduce the phrase, not to demean it). There are, like there are with all things to which we have a primary loyalty, ideal characteristics.

In the case of the American Cause, there are three elements or assumptions: a moral, a political, and an economic. The moral assumptions involve the Christian view of the nature of man and the proper view of the relation between church and state. The political assumptions are those which involve the concept of ordered liberty, which is based on the Christian view of man--primarily that he has inherent dignity and that he labors under original sin. The economic assumptions are those, again, which involve the Christian view of man, and imply a belief in economic freedom, which is based on this view of man.

The American Way, which is made up of those things to which we, as Americans, owe a primary loyalty, are ideals. The reality, to which we look to see how we measure up to them, do not affect or qualify them. In fact, if we do not have an ideal to which we expect our nation's action to live up to, then we have undermined our ability to criticize its actions at all, since we have not standard by which to criticize it.

Russell Kirk's book, the American Cause, is the best explanation of this that I know. I highly recommend it.

Superman vs. Jesus Christ

I am sitting here in my office, the door blocked by formidible stacks of books, beating back repeated assaults from two young boys who are demanding that I take them to see the new "Superman" movie.

As I sit here, occasionally taking nourishment from food and coffee passed to me through small holes in my defensive fortifications from my sympathetic wife, I am pondering a recent post on The Acton Institute’s website by Jordan Ballor about the tendency on the part of Christians to see Christian symbolism in the most mundane of cultural artifacts.

The operative statement in Ballor’s piece is this: “The comic figure of Superman may indeed point us to Christ. Many Christian commentators are right in recognizing this. But if we do truly see Christ through Superman, it is by contrast and not by similarity.”

His argument is that the character of Superman in the movie has more to do with Nietzsche’s “ubermensch” than the Christ of the gospels. The Christ of the gospels, he argues, “embodies mercy, weakness, and suffering.” He “humbled himself and became obedient to death…”

Well, yes, if the story stopped at crucifixion, then that would be a complete picture of Christ. But there are a few things that happened after this that really shouldn’t be ignored; namely, his Resurrection and Glorification–and his installation at the right hand of God Himself. We can’t simply limit our view of Christ solely to the role he undertook in his 33 year mission on Earth.

He was “made a little lower than the angels”, but He doesn’t remain that way.

The main point Ballor sets out to make is that we have a tendency to overstate the significance of the typological similarities of the characters in movies and books. And why not? It gets us out of the problem of being more discriminating in what we watch and read if we can simply attribute some sort of Christian significance to it.

Just look at the popularity of Mel Gibson’s "Braveheart" among Christian ministers as a type of the Christian leader. There’s a lot of discussion of his leadership qualities, but little remark on his little brush with fornication in the movie. That’s not to say that I don’t like "Braveheart" or that I see don’t recognize the Christian symbolism in it. My point (and this is where I agree with Ballor) is that this tendency has turned into an unthoughtful reflex action rather than a critical aesthetic confrontation with the work of art.

Witness the books that play off of this tendency in evangelicals, such as “Walking with Frodo: A Devotional Journey through the Lord of the Rings.” Say whut?

Look, I like the "Lord of the Rings". I think it is one of the greatest Christian books of all time. But a devotional? This kind of treatment just demeans the work itself–just as the silly repackagings of the Bible demean the Holy Scriptures.

Part of this, of course, is due the increasingly trivial and opportunistic Christian publishing industry, which tries to milk every evangelical trend for every dollar it can squeeze from it. (Do you have your “Prayer of Jabez Daytimer for Teens” yet?) And if it can do this by being parasitical on the broader secular culture, all the better. It does save us from the trouble of actually enriching the culture ourselves.

I agree with Ballor’s main point, but not the reasons he gives in support of it. There is very obviously typology in movies like "Superman Returns" that evidences Christ–through similarity as well as contrast.

I haven’t seen “Superman Returns.” But my ramparts will be breached in time, and I will be dragged from my redoubt, forced into a well-cushioned stadium theatre seat, and made to ingest mass quantities of buttered popcorn and Cherry Coke. Once thus installed, I will be able to offer informed commentary on the movie itself.

But there has to be some responsible way for Christians to recognize in a work of art the symbolism that follows necessarily on the fact that all nature bespeaks a Creator without getting silly about it.

See Quiddity for responses to this article by Jordan Ballor of the Acton Institute and others.