It’s Okay to Keep Loving Harry Potter
So an author we love went and publicly said a bunch of things that sit wrong with us. How do you move forward when a piece of literature that is part of your identity is now tied to statements and behavior you can’t agree with? While it feels like a problem specific to 2020, it’s nothing new. I’m not here to weigh in on the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s comments on Twitter, but I would like to talk about what happens when we find out that our favorite author’s beliefs do not align with ours and how it affects our attachment to their work.
Maybe it was a book you read as a child or a movie adaptation you hold dear memories of curling up and watching repeatedly with loved ones. It got you through the tough times, the times you felt alone, or those moments you just needed to get out of your head. All of that’s ruined now! Your fond memories with those characters have been invalidated by what your former hero said after a couple of glasses of wine. Oh, god. She’s making it worse, backpedaling, getting frustrated, doubling down. She’s already got your money after all, why does she need you to like her? I guess we can all go fuck ourselves.
Those are your memories, your experiences, and no one can take that from you.
The first time I felt betrayed by an author was back before it was commonplace to broadcast our every passing thought. I discovered that Orson Scott Card, author of the Ender’s Game series, is a hyper-religious nut job with some very concerning thoughts about homosexuality and race. Just Googling him will turn up a metric-fuck-ton of hatred and bigotry.
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Having no idea what Mormons believe, I researched the origins of why he feels this way. I came to realize the Ender series (and everything else he’s ever written) is riddled with parallels to the Book of Mormon. It’s a scripture that has only slightly more disjointed and absurd narrative elements than were forced on me in Christian Sunday school. (The origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the story of how their holy book was written is fascinating and well worth exploring.)
We are products of where we come from, and the stories we make our own are a reflection of that, whether we like it or not. The mythology and structure of religious upbringing have a direct correlation to the way different cultures and regions tell and relate to stories. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica series bears the similar parallels to the Book of Mormon; however, its creator hasn’t publicly gone on racist rants and express extremist opposition to same-sex marriage the way Card does.
The list goes on and on.
The last few centuries are littered with examples of world-renowned writers with problematic viewpoints. Maybe the world around them shifted and stopped aligning with their views, or someone dug up new information exposing the author’s dark side. Times change quickly, and it has happened a lot.
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Lewis Carroll was an early enthusiast of photography, but over half of his approximately 3,000 photographs are of children—many of which are depicted nude or in various states of undress. Although likely acceptable in the Victorian era in which he lived, this fact is even more disconcerting given his “uncle” relationship to Alice Liddell and her sisters. Furthermore, Vladimir Nabokov (who translated Alice into Russian) was quoted by a New York Times reviewer as saying there was “a pathetic affinity” between Carroll and the pedophile narrator of Nabokov’s novel Lolita.
Jack London was an advocate of violent social justice, and he believed those social rights extended to white men only. Charles Bukowski kicked his wife during a television interview. Rudyard Kipling published this hymn to U.S. imperialism titled “The White Man’s Burden” (not just racist, it’s straight-up terrible, lazy poetry). Charles Dickens blamed his wife Catherine for having too many children (10 to be exact), and in the pursuit of a divorce he apparently laid the groundwork to have her committed. A years-long correspondence between Flannery O’Connor and a close friend reveals her deeply ingrained southern racism and feelings about actions of prominent civil rights leaders.
So where do we put our new feelings?
In “The Death of the Author,” a 1967 essay by French literary critic Roland Barthes, he argues against the practice of including the author’s biological context and intentions in the criticism of literature. Barthes explains that “to give a text an author” is to assign a single interpretation of the work. While convenient for critics, the practice of attaching an origin point to the meaning behind a text connected to a writer’s “passions” or “tastes,” particularly in a work of fiction, is “interpretive tyranny.” He goes on to state, “a text’s unity lies not in its origins […] but in its destination.”
Something every writer should have learned in their first workshop is you will not be in the room to explain your work to your audience. Like children, just because you squeezed it out doesn’t mean you get to give its life meaning. Author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, struggled with this concept. When Bradbury became the first author of science fiction and fantasy to be honored by receiving a Pulitzer Prize for Fahrenheit 451, he refused to make the trip to receive the award. He would not have been allowed to give a speech, and the author had long struggled against the interpretation that his book was about censorship. Rather, Bradbury meant the text to convey the dangers and dulling effects of television. Once the story found its way into the hands and minds of readers, the story he’d created no longer belonged to him.
It Belongs to Us.
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Which brings us to now.
Turn of the 20th century author H.P. Lovecraft is responsible for the horror genre as we know it today. He is cited as a primary influence by everyone from Stephen King to Guillermo del Toro and all the way back to Richard Matheson—high praise for a guy who couldn’t write dialogue. Lovecraft was also a venomous racist. In 2016, author Matt Ruff gave us Lovecraft Country. The book has been adapted into a series of the same name that premiered last week on HBO. It explores an intersection of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and Jim Crow era racism. Given that Lovecraft’s work was created before Mickey Mouse’s Copyright Act of 1976, his stories are public domain and truly belong to all of us now. Albeit divisive, the material addresses the concept Barthes argued in “The Death of the Author” quite well while maintaining a love and reverence for the source material. Time has not been on Lovecraft’s side, but the continued life his stories have gained is far bigger than the man that wrote them.
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The way I related to the Ender series bears no relationship to Orson Scott Card. I made a connection with Ender. You may feel how Harry Potter felt sleeping under those stairs. A well-written story contains the essential human arcs and elements that stir a deeply personal reaction in us, but we bring our own viewpoints and associations to a story and that is what makes it special. Big ideas and interesting, flawed characters are often born of flawed writers.
If you are faced with an ethical dilemma purchasing one of these books, you can take into consideration whether or not that author is still alive. (Most of the authors I mentioned here are long dead. If anyone is still receiving a residual check, it ain’t them.) Save your money for a writer whose views align with yours. Buy their books secondhand and you’ll be instead supporting your local used bookseller. If you feel strongly about the things J.K. Rowling said, you can skip paying to see her half-assed Potterverse spin-offs.
There is no reason to comb pages of text looking for something insidious you missed. It’s up to you as the reader to bring your own connection to a story. They can symbolize anything you want them to. It’s always been your story. Don’t let anyone take it away from you.
