Fischer, Molly. “Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?” The Cut, 22 Dec. 2020, www.thecut.com/article/who-did-j-k-rowling-become.html.
“that world was…entirely mine”
“Is there a sense,” Gompertz asked Rowling, “in your own mind — philosophically, more than sort of literally — that you don’t own Potter anymore, that it’s owned by the fan base?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, Will,” she said, not quite smiling. (Someone with Rowling’s taste for adverbs might note that she said this rather sharply.) The collaborators sitting alongside her laughed. “I’m deadly serious,” she continued. “Because that would be to disavow what that world was to me. Seventeen years, that world was mine. And for seven of those years, it was entirely mine; not a living soul knew anything about it. And I can’t just uproot that from all the personal experiences that informed those stories and say, ‘I’m throwing that away now.’ And that’s how that would feel.”
“imaginative empathy”
Twelve years before, at a Harvard commencement, Rowling had delivered a speech in which she extolled the importance of imaginative empathy. “Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s place,” she said. But “many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are.”
“the author is always right”
“This Is Not a Drill” is the title of a Medium post on the case by the British philosopher Kathleen Stock, who had taken up Forstater’s cause. Apart from advancing philosophical objections to trans identity, Stock’s work focuses on aesthetics, and in that field, she is a proponent of “extreme intentionalism.” Set in opposition to Continental theory, this view holds that fiction is “a set of instructions to imagine certain things” — a book means whatever its writer says it does. The author is always right.
I’m interested in the overlap/mapping of theoretical authorial intentionalism, individual authorial control-freakery, and epistemic authoritarianism/culture-war epistemics here. And when it plays out on the stage of The Discourse and the bestselling mass-market franchise of the twenty-first century, which retains claims to moral education that are often renounced, it seems very clearly a where-the-theoretical-rubber-meets-the-real-world-road kind of thing.