Are you sure it wasn't just for the orck chasms?
Dumbledore ....
- Thread starter michaeledward
- Start date
Are you sure it wasn't just for the orck chasms?
i like this fictional characters' take on the fictional character
...
http://www.theonion.com/content/amvo/rowling_dumbledore_is_gay
...http://www.theonion.com/content/amvo/rowling_dumbledore_is_gay
Time magazine also had an article this week.
Outing Dumbledore
When J.K. Rowling said at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore--her Aslan, her Gandalf, her Yoda--was gay, the crowd apparently sat in silence for a few seconds and then burst into wild applause. I'm still sitting in silence. I feel a bit like I did when we learned too much about Mark Foley and Larry Craig: you are not the role model I'd hoped for as a gay man.
<snip>
So along comes Rowling with Dumbledore--a human being, a wizard even, an indisputable hero and one of the most beloved figures in children's literature. Shouldn't I be happy to learn he's gay?
Yes, except: Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words to help define a central character's emotional identity: "I'm gay." We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.
Which is why I think we should consider the much simpler solution: Dumbledore isn't gay in the Harry Potter saga. He may well be gay in JKR's imagining of him. But that imagining and the actual Harry Potter saga Dumbledore have no more necessary relation to each other than my imagining, or your imagining, or anyone else's imagining of AD—or Harry, or Hermione, or Ron, or Draco—have to the story. AD's alleged gayness was not part of the story, had no import in anything he said or did, and is reflected, so far as I can see, in no facet of the plot. If I'm right, then the narrative problem the Time magazine writer observes simply disappears: there was no actual denial involved—which would have, as the writer notes, been totally out of character for the Dumbledore who we know, on the basis of his words, decisions, and actions—because what would have been had to be denied, on Rowling's after-the-fact `revelation' was not actually true. For this reason, the article and commentary Kacey cites here could be taken to foreground the strongest possible reason to reject JKR's characterization of the Harry Potter epic Dumbledore (as vs. her own private vision of the character) as gay—because to assume him to be gay creates, rather than solves, a significant problem of consistency in the character where none existed before.
Of course, there's a way out for anyone who wants to defend Rowling's right to add biographic detail to AD's life in the epic which is completely uncorroborated by anything in the epic. It's this: you could say, well, Dumbledore doesn't deny his gayness; as you can see from the story itself, neither his sexuality, nor the sexuality of many of the other staff at Hogwarts, ever arises in any kind of direct way in any context, so why would it have been relevant for AD to assert his gayness, any more than for, say, Professor McGonagall to mention her straightness? We can make inferences about, say, Lupin and Snape (though admittedly not 100% definitive ones) based on their involvements, hoped-for or real respectively, with women, but about any number of the other figures who appear as faculty at Hogwarts, no. If there never was an occasion where it was relevant, why would we expect AD to interject the point completely out of context? Would that be any more in keeping with his character?
Someone who argues along these lines might imagine that they've gotten around the problem of character consistency, but then the 800 lb gorilla in the room has to be faced: since there's absolutely no reason, no context, no plot element, in which the issue of AD's sexuality legitimately arises as a question—something you have to insist on if you want to deny that any actual denial is involved as per the Times writer's complaint—then exactly what warrant do we have for interpreting him as indeed being gay? JKR's say-so? But now we're back to the same point: since, on this line of reasoning, we've agreed that there is no point in the whole seven book saga which pivots on AD's sexuality, what does it mean for JKR to assert anything about that after the fact? Suppose she `revealed' in an interview that McGonagall had actually been a Slytherin when she was a student at Hogwarts—would that actually make her an ex-Slytherin? And so on. The fact is, anything JKR reveals at this point which wasn't at least strongly implicit in the story is... well, fan fiction.
The only thing that upsets me about Dumbledore is that Richard Harris passed away and I am stuck with the "fake" Dumbledore...
God he is awful at Dumbledore!!
I swear if Jim Dale doesn't sound like Richard Harris it's scary.
God he is awful at Dumbledore!!
I swear if Jim Dale doesn't sound like Richard Harris it's scary.
Michael Gambon is a great actor—if you ever saw The Singing Detective, you'd have no doubts whatever about that; he was beyond brilliant. But definitely, he does not recreate the true Dumbledore of the the book that Richard Harris did. RH was absolutely perfect; MG's Dumbledore is by contrast a much harsher personality than either RH's or JKR's Dumbledore is.
Dale is a genius... by voice alone he manages to communicate the essence of each character, and to do so flawlessly every time. `Scary' is exactly the right word for someone who can randomly retrieve almost two hundred voices, consistently and with perfect `pitch' every time. He deserves every one of the Grammy's he's won, in spades....
I think we need to be very careful before we assert that there are no clues, no allusions, or no references to AD's sexuality. As has been mentioned before, homosexuality has played a large role in real occult magical practices. Do you know enough about those to notice what could be incorporated in JKR's narrative?
We need to be very careful not to look at this through the cultural lense that we currently see gayness. That is not the context that she associates with AD's character. He is a wizard tried and true I think we need to examine the character and narrative through that historical context.
Here's some information that people can use to inform themselves better before they go back and read. I'm looking for particular names, words or verbs that could have been used or turned into anagrams. Check it out.
Aleister Crowley
Argenteum Astrum
And then there is John Dee. Check out his picture...
Now look at this...
Highfield's claim, as far as I know, was corroborated by JKR, but more interestingly, check out the connection to Nicolas Flamel and Aleister Crowley that Dee has had. All of us who have read the book know that Nicolas Flamel was directly mention in the series.
Here is something else to think about...
First of all, just about all of the mythology that JKR ties to these objects is an occult allagory.
Secondly...
Enochian Magic
This is an enochian banner...
In JKR's narrative, the cross has been replaced with the occult sunburst cross used by the Golden Dawn.
With all of that being said, it makes perfect sense for AD's character to be gay. You can't look at this through our current cultural lense. Further, I would say that JKR left us PLENTY of evidence of THAT and WHOLE BUNCH more.
Holy Crap! I never expected this post to go like that. It was click click click and connection after connection popped up. This 25 minutes of research has totally blown my mind.
Aleister Crowley
Argenteum Astrum
And then there is John Dee. Check out his picture...
Now look at this...
Highfield's claim, as far as I know, was corroborated by JKR, but more interestingly, check out the connection to Nicolas Flamel and Aleister Crowley that Dee has had. All of us who have read the book know that Nicolas Flamel was directly mention in the series.
Here is something else to think about...
First of all, just about all of the mythology that JKR ties to these objects is an occult allagory.
Secondly...
Enochian Magic
This is an enochian banner...
In JKR's narrative, the cross has been replaced with the occult sunburst cross used by the Golden Dawn.
With all of that being said, it makes perfect sense for AD's character to be gay. You can't look at this through our current cultural lense. Further, I would say that JKR left us PLENTY of evidence of THAT and WHOLE BUNCH more.
Holy Crap! I never expected this post to go like that. It was click click click and connection after connection popped up. This 25 minutes of research has totally blown my mind.
But the burden of proof is upon the asserter. If someone wants to argue that Dumbledore is X, then no matter what X is, there has to be some reason to assert it which gives it a privileged status in the infinite list of things someone might think about Dumbledore. For example, Dumbledore is a vegetarian. Dumbledore prefers robes which do not have stiched-in pockets. Dumbledore's left arm is, due to a minor birth defect, noticeably shorter than his left arm.... If you assert any of these things—and `you' here includes JKR—then for it to mean something beyond your own private imaginings, your personal visualization of AD, you need to point to textual evidence, to show that it's not just in your head, but in the story as well.
These are generalities, UpN. It's also true that we need to be careful about assuming that something is or is not true about any place on the planet; but that doesn't mean that, when every single bit of so-called best-case evidence for the existence of the `Bermuda Triangle' has been reviewed in detail and shown to be nothing of the sort (as in Lawrence Kuschke's book), a supporter of that particular delusion can still say, `well, there are still more cases that you haven't looked at yet, so it's still an open question.' The fact is, if you want the Bermuda Triangle to be true, you can't say, you haven't disproven it—the burden of proof is on you, given the impossibility of disproving an existential assertion over an open set (e.g., you can disprove the claim that `All swans are white' by finding a melanstic swan, but you cannot disprove the claim that `there is at least one black swan', because unless you look at every swan that is, has been, or will be, you cannot know that the next swan you look at won't be black, no matter how many white ones you've already pointed to. So the burden of proof is on the one who claims that there is such a black swan to actually produce that swan.)
And in this case, the burden on proof is on you to present something that constitutes evidence for AD's gayness. Just as the burden of proof would be on you to offer proof, given the text, that McGonagall had been in Slytherin house as a student, if you asserted that she was. Or that Ron also had had an identical twin who had died at birth and was never, ever spoken of in the Weasley houshold. Or...
JKR could assert any of these other possibilities, but the same constraint is on her: OK, where's the evidence? The Times story Kacey referred us to gives one possible piece of reasoning for thinking that AD is not gay (i.e., if he indeed were, his lack of candor about it would contradict the otherwise completely consistent openness he shows in the rest of his personality). I've given a possible challenge to that line of reasoning in the post you've cited, but I don't know whether or not the Times story writer might not want to pursue the argument that if he were gay, Dumbledore would have made sure that people knew about it.
Yes, sexual boundary crossing is a component of magical tradition. But, as with Gandalf, or, arguably, Ursula Leguin's archmage Ged, there is also a tradition of mages in fantasy literature who derive their power directly from an angelic source; their magic is not, in that sense, `occult' but based on their being a conduit for some kind of cosmic ordering principle which they are, in a sense, a representative of, or caretaker for. So whether Dumbledore's power derives from occult sources is itself part of the question. As I mentioned, in at least one interview, JKR explicitly noted that Dumbledore was an angel, and she wasn't talking about his sweet nature. I also noted in earlier post that of course, if someone could demonstrate that the narrative doesn't make sense in one or more cases unless AD is gay, then that of course would change the nature of the case considerably. But so far, no one has produced anything that favors that interpretation.... and by the logic of the case, the burden of proof is on anyone who believes something about any of JKR's characters to demonstrate it. As soon as some piece of evidence on behalf of his gayness is actually produced, then there's something to talk about, eh?
upnorthkyosa said:
Of course it's possible. But what you are calling evidence for his gayness is nothing of the sort. It's at best evidence for JKR's sources of inspiration, sources for her iconography. But it doesn't contain the least bit of evidence for asserting a particular property of AD. The only evidence for that is the content of the story, the text. Again, I think you're conflating JKR's thinking with the narrative content of the Harry Potter saga. But it's a category error to treat these as the same thing.
But the burden of proof is upon the asserter. If someone wants to argue that Dumbledore is X, then no matter what X is, there has to be some reason to assert it which gives it a privileged status in the infinite list of things someone might think about Dumbledore. For example, Dumbledore is a vegetarian. Dumbledore prefers robes which do not have stiched-in pockets. Dumbledore's left arm is, due to a minor birth defect, noticeably shorter than his left arm.... If you assert any of these thingsand `you' here includes JKRthen for it to mean something beyond your own private imaginings, your personal visualization of AD, you need to point to textual evidence, to show that it's not just in your head, but in the story as well.
These are generalities, UpN. It's also true that we need to be careful about assuming that something is or is not true about any place on the planet; but that doesn't mean that, when every single bit of so-called best-case evidence for the existence of the `Bermuda Triangle' has been reviewed in detail and shown to be nothing of the sort (as in Lawrence Kuschke's book), a supporter of that particular delusion can still say, `well, there are still more cases that you haven't looked at yet, so it's still an open question.' The fact is, if you want the Bermuda Triangle to be true, you can't say, you haven't disproven itthe burden of proof is on you, given the impossibility of disproving an existential assertion over an open set (e.g., you can disprove the claim that `All swans are white' by finding a melanstic swan, but you cannot disprove the claim that `there is at least one black swan', because unless you look at every swan that is, has been, or will be, you cannot know that the next swan you look at won't be black, no matter how many white ones you've already pointed to. So the burden of proof is on the one who claims that there is such a black swan to actually produce that swan.)
And in this case, the burden on proof is on you to present something that constitutes evidence for AD's gayness. Just as the burden of proof would be on you to offer proof, given the text, that McGonagall had been in Slytherin house as a student, if you asserted that she was. Or that Ron also had had an identical twin who had died at birth and was never, ever spoken of in the Weasley houshold. Or...
JKR could assert any of these other possibilities, but the same constraint is on her: OK, where's the evidence? The Times story Kacey referred us to gives one possible piece of reasoning for thinking that AD is not gay (i.e., if he indeed were, his lack of candor about it would contradict the otherwise completely consistent openness he shows in the rest of his personality). I've given a possible challenge to that line of reasoning in the post you've cited, but I don't know whether or not the Times story writer might not want to pursue the argument that if he were gay, Dumbledore would have made sure that people knew about it.
Yes, sexual boundary crossing is a component of magical tradition. But, as with Gandalf, or, arguably, Ursula Leguin's archmage Ged, there is also a tradition of mages in fantasy literature who derive their power directly from an angelic source; their magic is not, in that sense, `occult' but based on their being a conduit for some kind of cosmic ordering principle which they are, in a sense, a representative of, or caretaker for. So whether Dumbledore's power derives from occult sources is itself part of the question. As I mentioned, in at least one interview, JKR explicitly noted that Dumbledore was an angel, and she wasn't talking about his sweet nature. I also noted in earlier post that of course, if someone could demonstrate that the narrative doesn't make sense in one or more cases unless AD is gay, then that of course would change the nature of the case considerably. But so far, no one has produced anything that favors that interpretation.... and by the logic of the case, the burden of proof is on anyone who believes something about any of JKR's characters to demonstrate it. As soon as some piece of evidence on behalf of his gayness is actually produced, then there's something to talk about, eh?
Of course it's possible. But what you are calling evidence for his gayness is nothing of the sort. It's at best evidence for JKR's sources of inspiration, sources for her iconography. But it doesn't contain the least bit of evidence for asserting a particular property of AD. The only evidence for that is the content of the story, the text. Again, I think you're conflating JKR's thinking with the narrative content of the Harry Potter saga. But it's a category error to treat these as the same thing.
Some random thoughts :
So if I wear a robe with a hood and a mask with silver cord for a belt on Halloween, does this make me a homosexual? I mean they are the trappings of magic, and one can back this up with all the phallic symbols in my living room. i.e. swords and knives and sticks and staves, and ..., well you get my point. Another point would be that I am divorced but no kids and no current girl friend, as any real man of hetro persuasion would be married or not find himself without a GF or have children running around the world that he may or may not be helping to raise. Having friends who are Homosexual, and knowing that one gay man married a lesbian women while both were in the military and then divorced to help their cover. I guess my divorce also supports that I am gay. The relationship between the two can be drawn.
I have paisley in my Dining room. I guess one could argue that it is another point for me being gay. Yet, it has nothing to do with me hating wall paper and taking it off and dealing with the mess and the paisley is nicely done and only part of the way up. But another point towards being gay.
I guess it is all about the symbology and the perceptions of others and nothing to do with personal being. While in college, I asked one gay male how he knew he was gay. He asked me to walk from the lab to the hallway, and pointed at a couple walking arm and arm. He then smiled and asked me a single question. Which *** did you look at? I said hers. He replied I have always looked at his. I said ok, I get it now. So, in this case, if the author wants her character to be gay, then he is gay. If it is to upset people that is her personality failing and has nothing to do with others being gay or not.
Hold the phone, exile. Lets not forget your assertion. Have you gone back and read the section that JKR points us? Have you gone back and reread all 800,000 words to make sure of that?
I've read it again and knowing that AD was gay certainly makes a lot more sense. As far as contextual evidence goes, I think that when you combine that evidence with the historical wizarding context in the characterization and iconography that JKR used, a case could be made that he was possibly gay. Now, the real work would be to trace all of these elements throughout all 800,000 words and see where it goes.
I'm very curious as to AD's relationship with Nicolas Flemel. The John Dee, Enochian Magic, Golden Dawn, Crowley connection seems to say that there may be more significance there then one first thought.
CoryKS
Senior Master
And then it gets weird: Harry Potter as Leftist wehrmacht against the American Way of Life. Brought to you by the French. Jeez, all I got out of the series was a furious desire to play Quidditch.
But I'm not the one who's making the claim, UpN. I hate to keep dwelling on the point, but the burden of proof isn't with me. It lies on person making the claim. I tried to be clear about why that's the case in my last post...
I think we already know that he was possibly gay—as is true for virtually any of the characters in the book, except perhaps for the Sorting Hat.
But notice:
The fact that the unrequited love affair with GG is, as she says, in her mind, is the key to the whole business. To you, this makes the relationship between AD and GG more plausible; to me, though, it adds nothing to the information she already supplies, in copious detail, about the two in the discussion AD and Harry have about the circumstances surrounding AD's sister's death. That's the problem: the nature of the AD/GG connection in JKR's mind isn't evidence for anything in the story. The evidence there is Dumbledore's tesitmony. JKR's remarks of course constitute more evidence for what was in her mind, but again... big difference.
Anyone who wants to can do that, and I'll be all ears if they find anything in the book which crucially, or even plausibly, supports JKR's impression that AD is gay.
Maybe. Or not. There are, it has been noted repeatedly, many specifically Catholic liturgical and musical references in Bach's Mass in B-Minor. I've yet to hear anyone try to argue from that that this greatest of all High Lutheran music makes it plausible that Bach was a closet Catholic... Reasoning from sources, from materials, to strong conclusion is very, very dicey.
I think that you are misascribing the assertion that "Dumbledore was gay" to me when all I'm doing is parroting what JKR herself said. All I'm trying to do is provide more context in which to understand how AD could be gay. Hopefully, I can provide people with enough information to go back and look for actual textual support and know what they are looking for.
Regarding the boldface, I think that your assertion, which runs counter to what the author has claimed, places a burden of proof on you. IMHO, I think you need to go back a reread the book taking into account the occult aspects as well as analyzing other connections that AD may have had before you can make THAT assertion.
No its not. Not when you take into account that Dumbledore was modled after John Dee and that much of the occult context and iconography draw directly from the things in which he was involved, which includes sex magic. Thus, I think it is more accurate to say that out of all the characters, it is probably most probable that Dumbledore was gay.
IMO, it provides more contextual evidence that further characterizes AD with John Dee the Occultist. I'm starting to believe that it ties into an underlying theme in the book. I'm not saying that JKR is promoting occult beliefs and/or secret societies, but I believe that she specifically wrote this story to use real historical traditions. Perhaps this was done to show that the wizarding world has always been hidden from the world of muggles...in which case AD's sexuality takes on even more meaning, because it adds even more to that connection.
My wife is a huge Harry Potter fan and I know she'll go back and reread it if I can turn her onto this. She's UpNorthMum on MT, so maybe she'll jump in if she bites. I'm currently revising a 500,000 word peice of science fiction, so I don't have time.
I think it would be different if Bach himself hinted or told us that he was Catholic...which is essentially what JKR did. All that needs to be done is for a reader to take the occult contextual information provided in this thread and reexamine the nature of the magic and activities of Albus Dumbledore.
As far as this thread goes, I think that all I have done is provide a different lense in which to read this story.
You don't need context. Dumbledore could be gay regardless of what JKR said. So could any of the characters, including the ones who have active heterosexual relationships.
Sigh...what I have claimed is that there is no evidence currently on the table that Dumbledore is gay, and that therefore there is nothing in the text which supports the assertion that he is gay. The author's claims are irrelevant. That's the critical point: the author cannot change the story after it's been told, unless she wants to go back and write a second edition. And that will not change anything, really; we will now have two different Harry Potter sagas, and the dispute will be about whether AD is gay in the first of these.
A story, once told, is independent of its author: it exists as a narrative on its own. It's always interesting to know what the author's take on the characters is, but it does not change the narrative content. So no, I do not have the burden of proof, because Rowling's private opinions do not count as narrative content: they do not belong to the story, but are what the lit crit types like to call a metanarrative, a story about the story. Commentary, whether it's the author's or someone else's, is fundamentally different from text: it is a different order of thing. If you want to argue that the story supports AD's gayness: fine—argue away! But the nature of the argument rests on hard evidence, evidence which consists of narrative problems that require AD's gayness in order to unravel. We have have line of analysis, that in Kacey's link, which creates a possible basis for a claim that AD isn't gay in the possible world created by the HP story. If there is contrary evidence making AD' gayness more probably, in terms of the coherence of the narrative, than his non-gayness would... let's have it.
No, I don't. Whoever is claiming that the text supports AD's gayness does. They have to defend that assertion, logically speaking. In the absence of evidence, the conclusion has to be that nothing in the story itself supports that assertion.
The fact that Dumbledore was `modelled after John Dee' is not part of the story, and what we know about that modelling is only that he was physically modelled after him. We have no information that anything else was. But I'll tell you this: we have evidence that Dee himself was heterosexual. He was married—which Dumbledore was not—in fact, Dee was married twice, and had eight children, which Dumbledore did not, so far as we can tell from the story itself. Dumbledore is modelled on Dee, you say? Then where is AD's wife, where is his daughter, the analogue of Dee's daughter Katherine? And if he is modelled on Dee, then the modeling was only very partial, in these respects. And in terms of the claims of AD's homosexuality, it better be: otherwise you now have the extra burden of showing that John Dee was also gay.
Your reasoning seems to be:
AD = John Dee
John Dee = occultist
occultism = sexual boundary transgress
therefore
AD = sexual boundary transgressor
therefore
AD = gay.
But you face the serious problem that if AD was modeled on Dee only physically, none of the crucial identifications hold. And if AD was modeled on Dee personally, then you are saying that Dumbledore's gayness crucially depends on identication with a man who was married twice, had eight childre, and whose life has, so far as I now, revealed no traces of homosexuality. Do you really want to go there, UpN? I myself think, from all this, that the tighter the identification with Dee, the weaker any case for AD's gayness becomes!
Well, one can tell any story one likes about another story; it will have greater or lesser plausibility. If you're basing anything on the linkage between AD and John Dee, though, I'd say you have your work cut out for you...
Again, no. JKR is not AD. She created him as a character in a story; he now exists in that story independently of whatever she happens to think that is not in that story. Whatever her sources for they, they do not implicate that character unless something inherent in one or more of the sources also turns up in the text of the narrative itself. And as I've suggested, if John Dee is the best that anyone can come up with so far as relevant sources go, the facts of his life pretty much pull the rug out of any use of him anyone would want to make of that line of argument. Similarly, Bach's sources do not implicate the exalted Protestantism that emerges everywhere in the B Minor Mass. Sources are just those—sources. They are not the story. Valid conclusions about the story derive from the story itself.
A different lens, or whatever one wants to call it, does not enforce a particular reading of the story in the absence of evidence for that reading. A `lens' is a hunch. Looking at things a different way does not—the critical theory `there is no reality' types(who figure that their own personal theories of the solar neutrino shortage are just as valid as the current solution supplied by particle physicists because science is, after all, just another text) notwithstanding—demonstrate that the world operates with multiple truths. It merely gives one a different-sized net to use in trawling for facts that bear on a hypothesis. The plaintiff is claiming that AD is gay, based at the moment on hearsay evidence. The defendent, the storyline, is claiming that there is nothing remotely strong enough to challenge reasonable doubt. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff, and I think the plaintiff would be gravely mistaken to summon John Dee as a witness...
What is "gayness" to an occultist? What does "sexuality" mean? Can you ascribe our current views of such to people who obviously believe differently? I think you need to translate such views into a hermetic, enochian magical, cabalistic perspective. What does being married twice and having eight children mean especially when one considers his underlying beliefs and the time period that he believed them? Apparently not much, because if you look at his what he wrote of his beliefs, he not redefined the boundaries of sexuality, but was involved in sexual experimentation of all sorts.
Now, I can't say that AD is a perfect replica of John Dee, but I do think that it provides a little more insight into at least JKR's metanarrative. As far as finding the textual support for this, I'm going to have to leave that for someone else. The only thing this does is provide a little context for that investigation.
With that being said, here is something I'm really interested in. If JKR says that AD is gay, doesn't it make sense for the reader to initially take her word for it and go back to the narrative to see if that is true? I think I would be much more skeptical if reader after reader was basically reporting that they could find absolutely nothing to support that.
So, I'm curious as to why the resistence? Especially before anyone has really done any work?
Especially when I spent five minutes, went back and reread the part where the relationship between AD and GG was explained and had a "hey wait a minute" moment.
I feel like you are starting with the premise that AD is not gay and JKR is changing the story after the fact.
Also, I don't understand your point about not needing context. Why wouldn't understanding the origin of the iconography and traditions help a person look for clues to a character's sexuality? That doesn't make any sense to me...
:idunno:
Now, I can't say that AD is a perfect replica of John Dee, but I do think that it provides a little more insight into at least JKR's metanarrative. As far as finding the textual support for this, I'm going to have to leave that for someone else. The only thing this does is provide a little context for that investigation.
With that being said, here is something I'm really interested in. If JKR says that AD is gay, doesn't it make sense for the reader to initially take her word for it and go back to the narrative to see if that is true? I think I would be much more skeptical if reader after reader was basically reporting that they could find absolutely nothing to support that.
So, I'm curious as to why the resistence? Especially before anyone has really done any work?
Especially when I spent five minutes, went back and reread the part where the relationship between AD and GG was explained and had a "hey wait a minute" moment.
I feel like you are starting with the premise that AD is not gay and JKR is changing the story after the fact.
Also, I don't understand your point about not needing context. Why wouldn't understanding the origin of the iconography and traditions help a person look for clues to a character's sexuality? That doesn't make any sense to me...
:idunno:
This line of reasoning seems to me to seriously beg the question. The question is, does the line of the story require us to apply an external historical frame which is not organically tied to anything in the story. Your question only makes sense if we are given a reason within the textto bring in a particular aspect of certain occult traditions (which you appear to be generalizing to universals, a seriously questionable practice in this case, bearing mind that much of the occult tradition was consciously defined by people who believe that their power came, as it were, from the `dark side of the force'—people like Crowley, whom you mentioned earlier, being a perfect example). But it is abundantly evident from the text that AD's magical career, and his antecedents, did not seek their power from that source. Who in the story did? Well.... um... Voldemort? AD's nemesis, as Sauron was Gandalf's nemesis? Remember, in one of his last conversations with Aragorn in LoTR, when Gandalf tells Aragorn that his role, and time, in Middle Earth have come to an end: `I was the Enemy of Sauron'. Capitalized. In the same way, AD is the Enemy of Voldemort. You could not have a clearer picture of the class between darkness and light than between AD and V, other mayb than Gandalf and Sauron, and in the former case, all the violations come from Voldemort. The horcruxes, for example, are absolutely typical of the occultic thread you continue to allude to—power through violation—but it's Voldemort, not Dumbledore, who commits those violations. It's Voldemort who commits patricide and sends his great-uncle to imprisonment in Azkaban for the rest of his life. It's Voldemort whose `signature dish' is the Avada Kadavra curse that in the end comes back to kill him. Darkness and Light, eh?
In the absence of any evidence provided from the structure of the story, the questions you're asking are unmotivated by anything in the story. In other words, their relevance, which you are assuming in advance, is actually part of the point under debate.
I have a metanarrative, you have a metanarrative, JKR has a metanarrative. But something in the metanarrative is not remotely the same thing as that thing being in the narrative.
No! It does not. If JKR pointed out where in the text the story she created made that evident, then fine—I have no horse in this particular race; I don't really care if it turns out that the story contains evidence of AD's gayness or not, as long as that evidence is actually identified, and as long as, in the absence of such evidence, we understand clearly that JKR cannot `make' the story something different from what exists, after the fact. What I am concerned about is author's abuse of their legitimate authority. If Rowling says, `Hey, I know something you don't know... guess what, Dumbledore is gay', my question to her, just as to you or anyone else who asserted it, would be, `Really? What makes you say that??' And if she says, `Well I created him, I know it', at that point we have what I would call authorial abuse. One of the great themes of modernist literature, explored in the work of Pirandello, Calvino and others is the autonomy of character: if an author gives life to a character, that character then is separate from the author and isn't subservient to the author's decisions about them. I won't take JKR's word about Dumbledore any more than I would take, say, Einstein's word were he to have assured me that the content of relativity theory ensured that, say, quantum theory could not be a complete theory of matter. (Actually,come to think of it, Einstein tried to do something vaguely like that. He inserted a term in the field equations describing the relationship between mass on the one hand and the metric tensor reflecting the curvature of space so that this curvature could not become infinite—in effect, ruling out both what we now call black holes, on the one hand and the expansion of the universe on the other. There was nothing in the field equations that determined this result; they were Einstein's gloss on the way the world seemed to him to have to be. He later admitted this to be his biggest mistake in his work on relativity. Yes, he created, or discovered, the relations among matter, energy and the structure of space, but he could not go in and alter that relation after the fact...)
You're saying that the fact that no one has yet gone back over the seven book canon with a magnifying glass and reported, `nope, can't find anything' makes you more receptive to the idea that there really is some evidence there? When you yourself indicate that you have too much going on in your life to do it? Well, ask yourself this: millions of people by now have heard about JKR's claim. Has anyone, even one person, written anything you know of to produce a single shred of solid evidence to back her claim about AD?
The resistance comes from the fact that a claim has been made with no substantiation. Isn't that enough to make one resist the claim? If you tell me something and I ask you why you said that and you don't have an answer for me... why on earth should I believe that what you said is true? Yes, it could be true, as could many other things, including the negation of the assertion you made. Logically, as I've mentioned, the burden of proof for an assertion lies with the one who makes that assertion.
I am starting with the premise that there is no reason to suppose that AD is gay, based on anything JKR has said, in the absence of textual evidence that his gayness is part of the story. Period. Your `aha' moment may indicate a tie-in with certain of your own beliefs and expectations, but are you really saying that if JKR had instead claimed that AD was straight, the AD/GG relationship would be murky and inexplicable? Is there an actually problem in AD's description of his relationship with GG that is now suddenly solved? Suppose, for example, that we didn't know that the Elder Wand accepts as its master the wizard who has defeated its previous master. Suppose JKR had, inexplicably, left that little fact out. The whole last hundred pages of the story, left unmodified, would fail to make sense. Those last hundred pages, and the culmination of the entire story really, depend crucially on that plot element. Well, what is there about the AG/GG relationship which fails to make narrative sense in the same way, or even a more attenuated way, and which requires AD's gayness to make sense of?
Let me try explaining again. First of all, in spite of your allusion to Dee's supposed wild sexual experimentation, he seems to have been conventional enough to resent bitterly the wife-swapping experiment that one of his associates at one time sought to arrange between the two of them. The iconography that Dee supplied was, as you yourself I believe it was pointed out, a purely physical resemblance. And you are persisting in treating the relevant traditions as though they consisted entirely of the one `black magic' strand often associated with magic by occult revivalists like Crowley, even though the tradition was much broader and richer than that (again, Tolkien provides an existence proof here). Finally, and most important, there is not the slightest evidence in the text that anyone has presented so far linking the `white magic' of AD and his `side' with the `black occultism' that has everything in common with Voldemort, and none so far defended for that of Voldemort' great Enemy. So I am questioning the grounds for the whole set of linkages you've established, and am saying that they do not make the case you want them to make, for the reasons I've given. As to whether AD is gay or not in the story, that's an empirical issue, to be resolved by the story. But JKR can't superimpose it on the story simply because she now thinks, or has always thought, of AD that way. If it's not supported by the story, then it's not in the story, and it's just her private opinion. I can't put it any more plainly than that....
Blotan Hunka
Master Black Belt
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Literature is like the whole 9/11 conspiracy stuff. You can find anything you want in it if you make enough convoluted connections. Many people insist that LOTR is a WWII allegory even though JRRT repeatedly denied it. JK could come forth now and say that Harry potter was Bi-Sexual and people would start looking for "evidence" in the story.
A couple of things...
1. Exile is right. This isn't going to go anywhere unless someone starts putting some textual evidence on the table.
2. I can in no way speak authoritatively on this matter. I hardly know a thing about what I'm talking about other then thumbing through a book here or there.
3. With that being said, I think that there is a curious connection between Albus Dumbledore, John Dee, the symbols used in the books, and real life occult traditions. How deep does this connection go, I cannot say. My guess is that it is pervasive based on the mythology behind the hallows, the symbol that indicates them, and its mimicry of real occult symbols.
4. I think the classification of the various occult traditions discussed as "black arts" is historically incorrect. From what I know, which isn't much, there are both white and black paths.
5. Another important thing to remember, when considering all of this, is that JKR made a point to show that AD was human. She gave specific examples during his life to show that he wasn't perfect. All of this forms a curious connection to the Hallows and AD's demise for trying to use the hallows to bring his sister back from the dead. My guess is that all of that ties back to real myths or traditions, but I'm not sure how or even what myths.
6. Regarding Authorial Abuse. Is that a real liturature term or is that just your opinion, Exile? I've never heard of it and I've spent a lot of time in writers circles (my undergrad minor is in creative writing, I have several published stories and poems, I've written 8 novels, and am currently working on publishing the last five...this certainly doesn't mean I should know everything...). If it's just your opinion, I'd have to disagree. Maybe JKR is just being provocative, but my guess is that, considering the level of detail she used in her story, there probably is something to it. Further, wouldn't it make sense to throw out a bombshell like that and then clam up in order to get people read the books again and figure out for themselves and sell more books by revealing a provocative secret about a main character?
Anyway, FWIW, now back to my writing...
1. Exile is right. This isn't going to go anywhere unless someone starts putting some textual evidence on the table.
2. I can in no way speak authoritatively on this matter. I hardly know a thing about what I'm talking about other then thumbing through a book here or there.
3. With that being said, I think that there is a curious connection between Albus Dumbledore, John Dee, the symbols used in the books, and real life occult traditions. How deep does this connection go, I cannot say. My guess is that it is pervasive based on the mythology behind the hallows, the symbol that indicates them, and its mimicry of real occult symbols.
4. I think the classification of the various occult traditions discussed as "black arts" is historically incorrect. From what I know, which isn't much, there are both white and black paths.
5. Another important thing to remember, when considering all of this, is that JKR made a point to show that AD was human. She gave specific examples during his life to show that he wasn't perfect. All of this forms a curious connection to the Hallows and AD's demise for trying to use the hallows to bring his sister back from the dead. My guess is that all of that ties back to real myths or traditions, but I'm not sure how or even what myths.
6. Regarding Authorial Abuse. Is that a real liturature term or is that just your opinion, Exile? I've never heard of it and I've spent a lot of time in writers circles (my undergrad minor is in creative writing, I have several published stories and poems, I've written 8 novels, and am currently working on publishing the last five...this certainly doesn't mean I should know everything...). If it's just your opinion, I'd have to disagree. Maybe JKR is just being provocative, but my guess is that, considering the level of detail she used in her story, there probably is something to it. Further, wouldn't it make sense to throw out a bombshell like that and then clam up in order to get people read the books again and figure out for themselves and sell more books by revealing a provocative secret about a main character?
Anyway, FWIW, now back to my writing...
UpN, it's a real term (check out http://www.wsfa.org/journal/j91/c2/index.htm, and many other websites, for some current usages) and it means a specific thing (or range of things). I am using it to cover a particular offense which the so-called `New Criticism', exemplified by critics like Cleanth Brook and R. P. Blackmur, was in a sense a reaction to: the assumption that the author's mind, not the text created by that mind, is the `proper home' of the meaning, or literary content, of the fictional work created. (If you're interested in this most rigorous and demanding of all critical approaches, there's a nice Wiki entry here on CB that explains why he was the dean of American literary critics of his generation and well respected even by people skeptical about the value of literary criticsm.) I used the example of Beethoven's somewhat banal pictorial imagery for his almost supernaturally beautiful Pastoral Symphony; the actual denotation of that symphony has nothing to do with any kitchy 19th c. shepherd-and-shepherdess clichés, but rather with the surpassingly beautiful melodic structure and density of the variations on that structure in each movement of the symphony. What I'm getting at here is a related notion, one that people like Brooks argued brilliantly—I'd say, lethally—for: the content of a work of art is what's in it. I want to see author's creations protected from author's moods, second-guessing, attitudes, and whatnot. War and Peace exists, The Scarlet Letter exists, all these wonderful works of literature we're the lucky inheritors of exist, and they themselves, in their plot structure, contain their own keys to interpretation.
Please don't think that I'm hostile to interpretation based on the writer's life. When you look at the complex symbolism of the poetry of authors like Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats or Wallace Stevens, you cannot decode the meaning of the words unless you are able to identify the symbolic code they're deliberately playing on (in a sense, like kata). But the point is, if we assume that poems have a logic and a structure that jointly express a coherent relationship amongst ideas, and we find passages in the poem from which it's impossible to extract those relationships on a literal reading, then we're forced by our assumptions to seek out the extended senses of the poetic language employed, so that in the end we can present that complex of relationships as a clean, integrated whole. That's what literary criticism was, once upon a time when intellectual integrity had a bit more weight in the world: a decoding of often exceedingly complex works of literary art into their components, with plenty of sharp argumentation to support the interpretation.
But the point is in the keyword forced. The failure of literal interpretation to yield anything coherent is the signal that you have to go well below the surface to make sense of the text of poems such as TSE's `The Wasteland' or Yeats' `Leda and the Swan'. And we know that in many cases these poets were consciously referring to specific works outside their own poems: Eliot, for example, is virtually banging it into your head at every turn that he's talking about the Upanishads, or Sir Philip Sydney, or whatever, and he even published notes to the Wasteland along with the poem which said, basically, look, you idiots, if you aren't going read Jesse Weston's stuff about the fertility myths that underlie the Legend of the Holy Grail, and figure out what I'm talking about here, I'm done with you. Very nasty chap, he was, but there you are. The notes are in fact part of the poem, though people don't often think of them that way.
But if someone creates a work of art and then, later on, says, well, you know, I think this or that about that... I have to say, I don't think their views have any kind of privileged status. If it turns out that you can't make good sense of the narrative structure unless you adopt their own attitude... sure; in that case, they've given you some information, after the fact, that they concealed from you, leaving you with a problem. But if there's nothing that structurally demands that perspective, and the author wants you to think it anyway—tells you, but can't actually show you, as they say—then that comes under the New Criticism idea that I'm including under the (widely used) term, authorial abuse. The main idea is: even if you create the work, you do not have carte blanche over it once you've put the pen down. In a sense, it's not yours any more, it exists on its own. If AD is gay, I'm saying, that proposition can only be interpreted meaningfully if it arises from the work itself, not from the opinion of a single individual who happens to have written the work, but hasn't actually shown us, in the work itself, what she want us to believe is there.
