Literary Debates

Plenty of people can relate to characters from fiction. Some take it a step further and start “conjuring fanciful biographies for the characters”, as Alan Jacobs puts it. Heard of fan-fiction? It’s the fiction written by fans of serials/books write based who then post it on the Internet. Lev Grossman describes it thus:

“They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”

A few years back, when the last of the Harry Potter books was released, the “Is Dumbledore gay?” question became red-hot on the Internet. Author JK Rowling’s take on the question was very interesting:

“My truthful answer to you…I always thought of Dumbledore as gay…Yeah, that’s how I always saw Dumbledore.”

I personally agree with Jacobs’ comment on Rowling’s response:

“Rowling seems to me saying that, since she never wrote anything in the books that directly addressed Dumbledore’s sexuality, she’s in more-or-less the same position as her readers, speculating about something that’s not in the “canon.”

Bryan Appleyard made a similar point on the debate as to whether or not the mob-boss of the hit TV series, Sopranos, dies at the end:

“I am not saying David Chase, the show’s creator, doesn’t have his own view on the subject but, once the last episode was broadcast, it was out of his hands. Tony Soprano became his admirers, as Auden said of Yeats.”

And that’s the very nature of all great fiction, says Appleyard:

“It was a triumphant denouement  – not in the banal form of an Agatha Christie thriller where everything is neatly wrapped up, but, rather, in the wild-eyed, wondering, speculative form of a Shakespearean tragedy. We can talk about the ending but we can’t, as it were, end it…I suppose people are taught to look too eagerly for ‘meaning’ in the most banal sense. No great work of art has this kind of meaning, rather it has the kind that expands in the mind to include many, if not all, meanings.”

Perfectly put. It applies to most characters of the Mahabharata as well.

The ending of the movie, Inception, is in the same category: did Leonardo de Caprio really make it home at the end? Or was it just a dream? Director Christopher Nolan’s opinion on that is as right or as wrong as the viewer’s.

Contrary to what the purists believe, looks like such literary debates can even be based on Hollywood shows and insanely popular books that people watch and read (gasp) voluntarily!