Rowling’s Harry Potter revisionism sparks questions about authorial intent and reader interpretation.
In his postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco notes that a “narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel”. Perhaps J.K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter and pseudonymous crime fiction, should have got that memo.
Rowling’s interview with Emma Watson, the actress who portrayed Hermione in the films, was her most direct salvo in the so-called shipping wars (derived from “relationship” to refer to a romantic pairing) that all but overtook the Harry Potter fandom several years ago, when it became apparent that Ron and Hermione were, indeed, a thing. The Harry-Hermione proponents went so far as to accuse Rowling of failing to understand her own characters.
But now, with Rowling’s admission that Ron and Hermione happened “for reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it”, they’ve had the last laugh. Or have they? It turns out that Rowling, aware she was committing “Potter heresy”, was a bit more circumspect; she acknowledged that the Granger-Weasleys would “probably be fine”.
The virulence of the muggle reaction suggests something deeper at play than Rowling’s romantic arithmancy. Readers form a relationship with a text as it exists, and while authorial revisionism like in Rowling’s case has no retrospective impact on the plot, it forever transforms how a fan reads the work. It feels like a betrayal, of both the emotional investment fans put in and the characters she created, to have Rowling now lament the choices she made.
