I think the narrator (the last narrator, who is always third person, the narrator who reports the speeches of all the figures on all the levels in a fiction, including the speeches of any first person narrator) -- I think the narrator has complete authority over the work. The question is whether JKR can continue to be a narrator once the work is done. Or can continue to create authoritative narrators. What about the later Henry James? Is the narrator of the later Portrait of a Lady the same as the earlier? At some point we discriminate between two still authoritative narrators, and we always distinguish them from the unauthoritative. Be "we" I mean "me."
At some point we discriminate between two still authoritative narrators, and we always distinguish them from the unauthoritative. Be "we" I mean "me."
This is true as an observation of human behaviour, but ultimately I don't know why we have to do this - that is, I can't see any reason to label one the false god, one the true, beyond a kind of neurotic urge to have everything neat and hierarchically tidy. If we were interpreting laws in a court there would be a point to it, but it's not obvious what the point is when we're talking about something as irreducibly multiple as story.
One base-line philosophical insight about truth is that if a statement is true there is something that makes it true. What makes a statement true in fiction? Only what an authoritative (= omniscient) narrator says, since there is no fact of the matter that can make it true, unlike in the real world. So the question becomes who's authoritative. I do think that's a psychological question -- that is it's about whatever aspects of human psychology make stories absorbing. Which is stuff I am writing about. One important datum is that good stories in all cultures regularly and reliably beat daydreaming. Probably because nothing makes a daydream true, whereas the author or narrator or story-teller makes a story true, relatively independently of our daydreaming wish-fulfillment. The truth of the outcome makes a difference: in happy endings part of the happiness is that something is making that happy ending true, fulfilling our wishes (that is, the omniscient narrator who isn't affected by our wishes or daydreams: e.g. that Little Nell would live or that Tiny Tim would, or that Catherine and Tilney would marry). Whereas if you can pick your own adventure, really you're heading in the direction of daydreaming. So you need some principle, even if it's an arbitrary one, to grant truth-making authority to. Authors are decent first approximations for that principle. (Hence "Franklin W. Dixon" and "Nancy Keene.")
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I think the narrator (the last narrator, who is always third person, the narrator who reports the speeches of all the figures on all the levels in a fiction, including the speeches of any first person narrator) -- I think the narrator has complete authority over the work. The question is whether JKR can continue to be a narrator once the work is done. Or can continue to create authoritative narrators. What about the later Henry James? Is the narrator of the later Portrait of a Lady the same as the earlier? At some point we discriminate between two still authoritative narrators, and we always distinguish them from the unauthoritative. Be "we" I mean "me."
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This is true as an observation of human behaviour, but ultimately I don't know why we have to do this - that is, I can't see any reason to label one the false god, one the true, beyond a kind of neurotic urge to have everything neat and hierarchically tidy. If we were interpreting laws in a court there would be a point to it, but it's not obvious what the point is when we're talking about something as irreducibly multiple as story.
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