What Rowling is doing now is writing fan-fiction about her own invented universe. It's quite different from continuing to write sequels. She can do what she wants, but I don't find this admirable.
I must distinguish this, however, from two situations where I find post-publication authorial interjection entirely desirable: 1) Polite responses to enquiries asking, not for more information outside the books, but clarification and expansion on what's in them; 2) Less-polite rebuttals to critics who think they know better than the author what the book means. Critics can say what they're reminded of, or what they see in the book, but when they declare what something in the book actually is or really means, they're trespassing into territory where the author's word should be law. We got this a lot from critics who said that Tolkien's Ring was an allegory for the Bomb.
I wonder whether allegory is a special case, in as much as to say that "X is an allegory of Y" may be a shorthand way of saying that "the author intended X to be an allegory of Y". It was this element of intent, as I take it, that for Tolkien distinguished allegory from applicability.
On the other had, an assertion such as "There are homoerotic elements in the relationship between Frodo and Sam" seems (whether or not one agrees with it) to be more about the text and/or possible ways of reading it, and less about what Tolkien intended. I don't think any of these cases are clear-cut, though, any more than the nature of intent itself is unitary, stable or well defined.
Whether there's a difference depends on how the critic puts it. So far, almost every serious discussion of the homoerotic elements in Frodo and Sam I've seen has carried its own distinct air of either 1) "I'm determined to see homoerotic elements whether they're there or not," thus saying much about the critic and exactly nothing about the work, or 2) "Frodo and Sam are gay lovers whether the author knows it or not," which is the critic declaring a certain knowledge of the work denied to the author. Both these fail my credibility test. It'd be possible to make a fair point out of a homoerotic reading, but I haven't seen anybody do it.
In a rigidly pedantic sense, yes. But in practice there's a difference.
Saying "Dumbledore is gay" in response to a specific question about his non-standard-heterosexual reaction to a romantic situation would be the one. Just up and saying "Dumbledore is gay" without any textual evidence one way or another was the other.
The situation in which she said it was somewhere in between, I think. It was in response to a question about whether Dumbledore ever found "true love". Perhaps, as far as she was concerned, the evidence was there in the text, for those with eyes to see.
In this particular case it's not just about whether (or how far) she went beyond textual evidence, but also about what her audience was prepared to hear. For example, there's no evidence in the book that Dumbledore is straight, but had she answered that he just never found the right girl it's highly unlikely that her remark would have been subject to the same kind of interrogation.
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I must distinguish this, however, from two situations where I find post-publication authorial interjection entirely desirable:
1) Polite responses to enquiries asking, not for more information outside the books, but clarification and expansion on what's in them;
2) Less-polite rebuttals to critics who think they know better than the author what the book means. Critics can say what they're reminded of, or what they see in the book, but when they declare what something in the book actually is or really means, they're trespassing into territory where the author's word should be law. We got this a lot from critics who said that Tolkien's Ring was an allegory for the Bomb.
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On the other had, an assertion such as "There are homoerotic elements in the relationship between Frodo and Sam" seems (whether or not one agrees with it) to be more about the text and/or possible ways of reading it, and less about what Tolkien intended. I don't think any of these cases are clear-cut, though, any more than the nature of intent itself is unitary, stable or well defined.
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Do you find that to be a clear-cut line? I find it to be the farthest thing from.
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Saying "Dumbledore is gay" in response to a specific question about his non-standard-heterosexual reaction to a romantic situation would be the one. Just up and saying "Dumbledore is gay" without any textual evidence one way or another was the other.
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In this particular case it's not just about whether (or how far) she went beyond textual evidence, but also about what her audience was prepared to hear. For example, there's no evidence in the book that Dumbledore is straight, but had she answered that he just never found the right girl it's highly unlikely that her remark would have been subject to the same kind of interrogation.