Books Belong to Their Readers

With the somewhat overblown panic these last couple of weeks about J.K Rowling's implication that she wishes she had paired Hermione with Harry, I’ve been thinking more than usual about the relationship between book and reader. While I was, you know, absolutely horrified by the possibility that she doubted her choice (#ginny4ever), it’s also struck me that I’m a little too accepting of what an author thinks about her own book, at the expense of forming my own thoughts about it.

Kansas and I are planning to write about John Green next week, so this will probably come up again, but something he brings up all the time is the idea that “books belong to their readers”-- that a book, or any piece of art, isn't a stand-alone thing. It's only complete when readers interact with it, which gives them just as much ownership over it as the author has. It came up again in my college hermeneutics class, this time more officially as reader response theory. And I didn’t like it. I want there to be a right answer, and if the right answer is that I get to decide what’s important about a book or how to interpret it, I’m never going to be satisfied with that. I want my right answer to be everybody’s right answer.

So in this case, I’m not really sure what to do when I read a book and get attached to the characters. I want to know what happens to them after the end of the story, and the answer is that nothing happens, because they only exist inside the book. But with Harry Potter, it actually appears possible to find out. Rowling has thought through the fate of seemingly every character, no matter how minor, and she is happy to share her imaginings with fans. There’s an epilogue too, so some of it is contained in the actual story, but most of it has been extra-textual. Interviews, lectures, Pottermore-- she’s put out an incredible amount of information about her created world in addition to what’s in the books themselves. And I’ve read all of it, of course. Even as I’ve slowly come to believe that authors don’t have unquestionable authority over their texts once they’re completed, published, and read, Harry Potter has always been the exception. Until, of course, the Harry/Ron/Hermione debacle of two weeks ago made me realize I'd been treating it differently than everything else I read.

So, there’s the issue of whether anything happens to characters after the end of the book. This is typically a pretty fraught issue, because the purpose of reading is relating, and if you see yourself in a character, you’re going to associate what happens to that person with what happens to you. The simple answer is that, regardless of what the author says, absolutely nothing happens to a character after the end of a book. They don’t exist outside its pages. That doesn’t mean it can’t be helpful to imagine futures for characters you care about, which plenty of people do, but it seems important to me to recognize that anything outside the pages of the book has no effect on the quality or content of the book itself.

And then there’s the second issue, which is whether an author’s perspective on their own work is more important than their readers’. This relates less to the fate of the characters than to the book itself, I think, because often when we search for symbolism or meaning, the question that comes to mind first is “Did the author intend for me to take it this way?” I’m of the opinion (though it took a lot of time for me to get there) that it doesn’t matter, because interpretation doesn’t exist in the book itself. It exists in the minds of the book’s readers. Something can be meaningful, can teach you and inform the way you look at the world or at other people, without the author having ever given it a thought.

In my black-and-white thinking, it’s easier to try to search for what the author meant, because if I do a good job, I’ll get a right answer and I’m done. What turns out to be much more difficult and complex is if I turn off the search for someone else’s ideas and start looking for my own. If I’m open to what the story has to teach me, through a sentence, a character, a theme or a metaphor, it suddenly doesn’t matter if my answer is right or not, because the purpose of reading is defeated with that mindset. We tell stories because people matter, because we want to grow in understanding outside ourselves. It’s certainly possible that trying to understand the author could be an interesting exercise, but if an author is good at their job, their work should help you understand more than just their own intentions while writing.

So my question has been how much privilege I give an author over their own story. Truthfully, I will probably always listen if a writer wants to talk about what they were trying to do with their own book. I will probably take that information into consideration as I read, and most of the time, their thoughts are going to be better informed than mine. But I’m also trying to allow myself the room to have my own thoughts about the work. If I find it to be meaningful or helpful in a way they didn’t intend, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong and doesn’t matter. It probably means my experience is different, my personality is different, my timing is different-- any one of a number of things. Growth and discovery are more important than thinking only about what the author intended.

-Lemon