the reinvention of close reading: harry potter, gay subtext, and death of the author

[merelydovely]

Tumblr helpfully directed me toward this wonderful article in the Paris Review stuffed with a visceral nostalgia for the heady early days of Wolfstar, back when we still believed JK Rowling understood her own characters as well as her readers did.

The summer of 2003 was the summer of noticing. It was the summer I sat alone for hours in my mother’s parked car, blasting Queen’s “The Show Must Go On” (track 17 on my favorite CD) and luxuriating in body-racking sobs of grief for Sirius Black, sorrow for Remus Lupin, and ecstatic rapture that I’d noticed. We took to the internet, those of us who had noticed, and compared notes. Often these notes took the form of fan fiction, which I read ravenously, hungry not so much for erotica as for the full novelistic experience Rowling had invited us to imagine—a boarding-school romance turned wartime tragedy, Maurice meets Atonement by way of Animorphs.

I'm a few years younger than the article's author, so it took me a little bit longer to get on the "close read" bandwagon, but this article struck a chord with me all the same. It really did feel, for a while, like Sirius/Lupin was where things were heading, and like we were all geniuses for seeing the signs.



And it felt that way all too often, didn't it? A few short years later, I was up to my eyeballs in meta for House M.D., convinced with all the zeal of a convert that surely the show was setting us up for House and Wilson to be together. It just made sense.

And then another couple years down the road for me it was BBC Merlin with Merthur, and Teen Wolf with Sterek, and Sherlock with Johnlock, and I eventually stopped really believing there would ever be any follow-through, but I never stopped being mad that these shows were actively trying to get me to do the legwork to create queer romance where there was none.

I'm the kind of fan who likes to exhaustively ground their shipping in canon hints, but I feel like these days I no longer have sufficient emotional patience for doing proper close readings of modern shows. Like, I still appreciate them when I see them, but I'm overall significantly less effortful about unearthing queer subtext in places that by all right should have queer text. Now I'm more likely to just go with "I like them together so they're queer because I said so," instead of trying to justify my ship with well-cataloged canon proofs.

This might explain why I've found a fandom home in the Les Misérables fandom, which is still arguing about gay subtext in a book written in the 1860s. And we still give Victor Hugo grief for not making things explicitly gayer, since that kind of story wasn't unheard of even then.



What's your immediate reaction to the article? Do you have any memory of those pre-Potterdammerüng days? What do you feel is gained by doing close reads of media that are unlikely to bear fruit?

Comments

[ineptshieldmaid]

I think I only really got caught up for the first year or so in believing that creators were /strategically/ seeking to create the effects I saw (although in terms of movies and tv, sometimes SOME of the creators are - the Ben Hur situation is a case in point). I think, because my coming to fandom and my coming out were also tied up with my coming to queer theory as a medievalist, I just didn't sustain a long-term interest in Word of God level truth.

The equivalent decoding-systems of queer reading in academia, especially for premodern academia, rely on the fact that The Queer Truth has been Suppressed, and we must decode it (h/t Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she calls this the hermeneutics of suspicion). That's intoxicating in its way, too. But by that point I was already fed up with the comparable feminist lit crit strategies (there's... i have no idea if you know of a poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but anyway, there's a foundational feminist essay on it that seems to assume the character of Morgan has an existence separate from the poem and has been suppressed BY the poem), so gravitated to more... pluralistic ways of thinking about reading. Reader response rather than authorial intent or societal suppression.

I did all that and a coupla theses alongside growing into adulthood in fandom, so the two concepts are deeply entwined for me in ways that get awkward at times. Inception fandom really epitomised what I like in a reading community - that fandom was high on symbolism and coding, but never really got into One True Canon-ism. By and large it treated the canon and the surplus of meaning generated by the canon as _something we could use to communicate with each other_. That's... very much what I see happening in Arthuriana in the long run (and why I literally did not speak to a friend for nine months after she tried to get me into an argument about The Real Morgan Le Fay, circa Merlin s2).

Anyway, um hi, you probably don't know me well enough to know that a. I WILL put citations in my fandom meta and b. everything is about Arthuriana to me

[obstinatecondolement]

I feel nostalgic for the time when I could do a close reading of a text without the devil on my shoulder hissing "You're being queerbaited - they're exploiting you." The fourth wall is just gone between fandom and creators now; they know what we want and they know how to give us enough subtext to keep us interested without ever taking a real risk.

But I don't want to be so cynical. I want to be able to enjoy subtext between same-sex couples the same way I would with f/m couples - Josh and Donna didn't get together until season 7 of The West Wing. I want to be able to have shows where we have seven seasons of build up for a same-sex that don't feel insulting and then anticlimactic, if that makes sense.

[captainlordauditor]

I'm college aged *now* so I'm too young to remember the days when JKR had faith from her fans.

I agree, though...it's very frustrating, because theoretically I love will they-won't they, except that I've seen it enough times to know the answer 95% of the time: If it's interracial, they won't. If it's gay, they won't. If they're straight and white, they will, probably after he harasses her for three seasons. That's one of the few things I liked about Legend of Korra, and which it did better than its predecessor. We were all scared we were imagining things but nope! They followed through! Dislikable as the comics are, the first LoK opened up with a kiss between two women!

I was at a convention panel in May about queerbaiting and I asked "how do you tell the difference between slow-burn and queerbaiting?". The answer we agreed on? You don't. Queer couples don't get slowburn in canon, that's why we have fanfic. Ever since then I've been contemplating ways to open this theoretical show I have in my head with one of my characters already out so that people have some amount of trust for it. I really like subtext and slow-burn but I'm queer, so I can't have the reward at the end.

[altilis]

I was actually a few years too young when OotP to really be affected by Sirius' death; at the time I didn't see his importance as a character, and while I knew that R/S was a popular pairing, I wasn't interested, because "old guys." They were over thirty! Way too old. I vividly remember the anguish on my friends page from his death, though, and I think if I were part of that fandom now, in my late 20s with so much more life behind me, that it would hit me in the same way as them.

Close reading in the current fandom climate is, first, just a great way to engage with people over topics that have much lower stakes than our current IRL topics of conversation (politics). Second, as a writer, I believe close reading lets me know what people tend to look for (or trained to look for) in character interactions and to tailor scenes that are much more subtle on the surface, but to the astute reader can scream "THEY'RE GONNA FUCK."

[implicated2]

I LOVE THIS ARTICLE!! I love how seriously and academically and lyrically it takes what is usually stigmatized as frivolous in literary circles. It makes me nostalgic for Harry Potter fandom, and I wasn't even IN Harry Potter fandom.

As far as close reading, I find that I'm not particularly drawn to look for subtextual ships in a text. I could say it's because I don't feel hopeful about finding subtext that isn't queerbaiting (intentionally or otherwise), but I think it's more just that my approach to ships in fanfic is more about exploring what if Person A and Person B were involved than feeling passionately that they are or should be involved. Which is maybe in part because a lot of my fandoms are RPF, where authorial intention is less of a thing (though there are sometimes things that ride the line between fan service and queerbaiting).

[adrianners]

Still mulling this over. I suspect the short version is that seven post-grad years in literary studies plus twenty years in fandom have made it so the only meta I'm interested in anymore is work that focuses solely on opening new interpretive possibilities, as opposed to proving the author the Most Correct or Most Moral. The best examples I can think of are the old Ship Manifesto essays for non-canon ships that the manifesto authors had accepted weren't going to happen. It's not necessarily real, but look at how fun it is to read the text this way! That's where the magic happens. I'm not really wired for ships that have no canon basis, but I can usually see what a fan gets out of it, at least.

Same goes for Word of God. I don't have to dissect every single piece of it to make sure my understanding of canon is correct and cohesive (though my brain usually goes there anyway because I'm a cataloger by nature), but what are the new possibilities we can put into fanworks because of, say, a new interview? Since there's YOI talk up-thread, a recent-ish example of what I don't want was the idea that "The prequel movie will finally put everyone on the same page about the characters' pasts." No. Boring. Unblocking just for the pleasure of hitting block again. The movie is going to give a million new unanswered questions to play with, and we'll still be free to ignore any bits that don't serve our fun in any given context. I'm still probably going to get obsessive about "Okay, but if this real skater for sure exists in the YOI-verse, what does that mean for Worlds 2010?" but that is my kind of fun, and I'm never going to force it on anybody else.

Crap, this was supposed to be the short version. I guess it still counts as short-ish. (I! Missed! This! Real comment threads are the best.)

But the main thing I got from that article is that I could have written every word of it, from the gleeful affirmation I found in "The Case for R/S" to the uncontrollable sobbing over Sirius to the slow realization that JKR had no idea what this army of queer teens and 20-somethings had actually seen in her text... and she didn't care to hear about it. My experience had the twist that I was actually quite interested in Remus/Tonks too. That is, until it actually happened and was a pile of emotionally manipulative horrors instead of the awkward bi duo being bi and awkward together (which I still seek out in nostalgia fic binges because their What Might Have Been makes me almost as happy as Wolfstar itself does). I was very lonely at that stage in my life, and reading this makes me wish I could reach back in time to tell 16-year-old me that over fifteen years later she would find her experience was shared identically with other 16-ish-year-olds across the world. It was hard to understand that at the time because, ahem, many of us were lying about our ages to be in fandom c. 2003.

[hlagol]

Goddamn, fangirls in the Paris Review. Will wonders never cease?

I think there is a joy in a shared analysis (or even just a shared desire), even if it will never bear canon fruit. Indeed, if Harry Potter taught me anything, it was that I don't really need the close reading anyway. Just a feeling, a chemistry, a recognizable archetype - that's plenty. I've read so much fanfic that surpasses the original work's subtlety and writing quality that I no longer really hold source material as necessarily hierarchically superior. Good writing is good writing, good characterization is good characterization, and who really cares where it comes from. I'll always be grateful for canon works because they ignite shared fires in people, and I'll always love fanfiction because there's a shorthand that saves me reading buckets of exposition and makes me pre-invested. But the line by line assessment of who looked at who, when? R/S more or less cured me of that. Death of the author indeed.

[merelydovely]

I've read so much fanfic that surpasses the original work's subtlety and writing quality that I no longer really hold source material as necessarily hierarchically superior.

God, ain't that the truth.

I'll always love fanfiction because there's a shorthand that saves me reading buckets of exposition and makes me pre-invested.

Yeah, that's something I don't think I initially appreciated about fanfic, but when I started trying to advocate for the genre to outsiders it was way up there as a reason that fanfic is unique in the way it allows authors to play with shorter forms.