I don't see that Rowling is doing anything different from any other author who writes a series of books set in the same universe and/or employing the same characters. I mean, no-one ever complained about John Buchan writing yet another yarn about Richard Hannay. All that's changed is that- instead of writing more books- Rowling is using media that weren't available to an earlier generation.
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.
So far as social meejah I can't abide Rowling. She wrote a very lucrative series of kids books. Why the hell she feels qualified to pontificate (like some mad old lady with a cat) on Scots independence, or anything outside Potter is stupefying.
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."
As a writer, I think that a work has to stand on its own. If you ex-post-facto it up with "Dumbledore is gay," then what you're basically admitting is that you think it's important to convey this, but you didn't bother doing a good enough job of writing to convey it in the actual books, so you're doing a patch job now. Which is fair enough, I guess, insofar that as much I enjoyed the HP books, I've always thought the world-building and characterization were pretty crappy.
As a critic, I fundamentally don't much care what the author thinks zir text means, for a couple reasons. One is that interpretation is a different activity than writing; there's no reason to suppose that someone good at the latter is good at the former. Another is that what the writer thinks something means does not change what the words on the page say, and if a critic can support zir argument using the words on the page, no amount of nuh-uh-ing from the author makes that evidence go away. Conversely, a writer can insist and insist that a meaning is there, but if nobody actually can pick it up from the words on the page, well, authorial intent plus $2.75 will get you on the subway.
But I think there's a difference between authors elaborating on their fictional worlds and authors trying to assert control over critical interpretation. Dumbledore is gay? Sure, why not. They're her characters. That's just world-building. It's her job. If she says "Dumbledore is gay and you can see that in the first book," however, I'm going to have to assume that she's hallucinating new text in there.
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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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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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As a writer, I think that a work has to stand on its own. If you ex-post-facto it up with "Dumbledore is gay," then what you're basically admitting is that you think it's important to convey this, but you didn't bother doing a good enough job of writing to convey it in the actual books, so you're doing a patch job now. Which is fair enough, I guess, insofar that as much I enjoyed the HP books, I've always thought the world-building and characterization were pretty crappy.
As a critic, I fundamentally don't much care what the author thinks zir text means, for a couple reasons. One is that interpretation is a different activity than writing; there's no reason to suppose that someone good at the latter is good at the former. Another is that what the writer thinks something means does not change what the words on the page say, and if a critic can support zir argument using the words on the page, no amount of nuh-uh-ing from the author makes that evidence go away. Conversely, a writer can insist and insist that a meaning is there, but if nobody actually can pick it up from the words on the page, well, authorial intent plus $2.75 will get you on the subway.
But I think there's a difference between authors elaborating on their fictional worlds and authors trying to assert control over critical interpretation. Dumbledore is gay? Sure, why not. They're her characters. That's just world-building. It's her job. If she says "Dumbledore is gay and you can see that in the first book," however, I'm going to have to assume that she's hallucinating new text in there.
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