| From
the January/February 2008 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Curtain
 s
J. K. Rowling so famously revealed to an audience at Carnegie Hall
this past October, her beloved wizard Dumbledore is gay. Or was
gay, given that he’s dead. Or could be thought of as having
been gay since he’s dead, fictional, and, even when fictionally
alive, never expressed or overtly demonstrated an orientation one
way or another.
Ms. Rowling of course has the right to say whatever
she likes about her characters — or, indeed, anyone else’s
— and in fact her outing of Dumbledore was modestly and correctly
hedged: “I always thought of Dumbledore as gay,” she
said. Also, it was in response to a question from the audience (“Did
Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall
in love himself?”), not something she peremptorily announced
with a big gay flourish of trumpets. But in the news reports I read,
listservs I monitored, and websites I cruised, Dumbledore had somehow
become definitively gay, a coming-out that elated those who felt
he was hoisting the rainbow flag for gender multiculturalism and
Positive Role Models and that confirmed the opinions of those who
have felt all along that Rowling is a servant of Satan and Harry
Potter, her grimoire.
Given that the last book in the series has now
been published, it’s understandable that author and audience
alike want to keep Harry Potter going. (I’m reminded of all
the “Reunite the Beatles!” petitions that circulated
in high school.) But how I wish that Rowling had answered the question
— any such question, really — with “What do you
think?” thus encouraging her petitioner to do what readers
are supposed to: engage. Whether we are happy or horrified by Rowling’s
Dumbledore revelation, why do we so readily give up the reader’s
prerogative?
• •
•
All books leave readers with questions; a good
book leaves us with good questions. Asking ourselves if
Dumbledore ever found love (or what might have happened if Stanley
Yelnats had not found the sneakers, or whether Harriet M. Welsch
ever found culinary pleasures beyond tomato sandwiches) is how we
give a book life within our imaginations, make it our own. Like
Philip Pullman’s subtle knife, those questions open the fabric
between the writer’s universe and our own.
Pullman has been facing some questions of his own,
indefatigably promoted by a one-man Magisterium, Bill Donohue, spokesman
for the Catholic League, spurred into somewhat tardy action by the
movie release of The Golden Compass in December. Pullman’s
His Dark Materials presents a magnificent panoply of inquiries —
about God, “Dust,” and the human imagination. Is the
trilogy a challenge to the Church? Absolutely. But mostly it is
a challenge to any readers or pundits who expect a book —
or its author — to do their thinking for them. Those who point
to Pullman’s own outspoken atheism as evidence for his books’
“agenda” aren’t trusting the tale or its readers;
as with J. K. Rowling, we should not take him too much at his word.
It’s not a writer’s privilege or responsibility to tell
you how to read her or his book. Talk is cheap, but print, still,
is more or less forever.
From the January/February 2008 issue of
The Horn Book Magazine |
