Chapter titles, red herrings, false clues
Jun. 27th, 2003 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaOver on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jlh's journal there was the beginning of a nice little discussion about chapter titles, ToCs (tables of contents), and whether or not they are spoilers, false spoilers, a Good Thing, or an irritant.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jlh/81388.html?nc=10
sjbranford commented there (& I hope doesn't mind me quoting him here):
"A book of that length does not need a ToC. The changes between chapters are obvious enough, as the header to each alternate page has the chapter name on it. False teasers are worse than spoilers in my view. If I am going to be spoilt I want to at least know the truth."
I can understand not liking false spoilers; sometimes one feels altogether manipulated by an author's game-playing.
But with HP I feel that the question is by now almost moot.
*Grand Unified Field Theory Alert*
Rowling has always sprinkled both real and false clues throughout her books. For example, there are clues in each book to the next book(s). Some of them are red herrings, some are real.
In writing a 7-vol series, she has developed a network of relationships: of one book to another; of each individual part (volume) to the whole (the complete narrative). The structure of each volume recapitulates the structure of the whole: that is, each chapter has a narrative relationship to the whole volume.
We are a unique audience, because we are reading the series the way Dickens's and Trollope's first readers did: in serial form, with long gaps between new parts. And the blank time between each new volume generates a world of speculation, minute scrutiny of the text, explosions of new spinoffs and alternate universes. Each successive pause has generated an exponential increase in these metaworlds of reading and rereading. And Rowling responds to this. (Though I am glad to see that she has not allowed it to unduly influence the stories themselves.)
Unlike us, future readers who someday buy the whole Harry Potter series will know the whole set of book titles in advance, just as we know all the chapter titles of OOTP now. Will their experience be different from ours? Yes.
Will it be diminished by knowing all 7 book titles at once? I don't think so. At most, they will know that Harry doesn't die in vol. 6, because they will be able to see in advance that vol. 7 is titled "Harry Potter and the Temple of Doom," not "The Order of the Phoenix Avenges Harry." Whereas we poor sods merely hope that such will be the case.
And with the complex relationship that has developed between the books and the reader (all the baroque layers of interaction between canon and non-canon, all the frenzy and urgency and desire, etc.), it is only to be expected that Rowling will make use of every tool available to her.
The chapter titles, and especially in the list of them that appears in the front of the book in the ToC, provide a space for one more little mindfuck of the reader.
On a practical level, a ToC has a real and effective purpose. It is part of the traditional structure of a book, like page numbers. One could argue that OOTP doesn't need page numbers either, since they only really become necessary when people write scholarly essays with footnotes that cite a passage by its page number.
But we are used to page numbers; the only secret they give away is that the book has a narrative sequential order: a beginning, middle, and end. (Except in the case of a few experimental novels like Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Cortazar's Hopscotch).
I too want to be surprised; I hate spoilers. (I cannot fathom those readers who read the end of a book first, because they hate the tension.) I tend not to read the ToC in advance. But in OOTP, I did read the ToC, with great amusement, seeing that in itself it contained a whole set of games, tricks, sleight-of-hand. Magic at work.
The best magicians, like Ricky Jay, always show the audience exactly what they're doing; it doesn't ruin the illusion; it makes the astonishment all the greater. Or so I think.
*/Grand Unified Theory*
jlh's journal there was the beginning of a nice little discussion about chapter titles, ToCs (tables of contents), and whether or not they are spoilers, false spoilers, a Good Thing, or an irritant. http://www.livejournal.com/users/jlh/81388.html?nc=10
sjbranford commented there (& I hope doesn't mind me quoting him here):"A book of that length does not need a ToC. The changes between chapters are obvious enough, as the header to each alternate page has the chapter name on it. False teasers are worse than spoilers in my view. If I am going to be spoilt I want to at least know the truth."
I can understand not liking false spoilers; sometimes one feels altogether manipulated by an author's game-playing.
But with HP I feel that the question is by now almost moot.
*Grand Unified Field Theory Alert*
Rowling has always sprinkled both real and false clues throughout her books. For example, there are clues in each book to the next book(s). Some of them are red herrings, some are real.
In writing a 7-vol series, she has developed a network of relationships: of one book to another; of each individual part (volume) to the whole (the complete narrative). The structure of each volume recapitulates the structure of the whole: that is, each chapter has a narrative relationship to the whole volume.
We are a unique audience, because we are reading the series the way Dickens's and Trollope's first readers did: in serial form, with long gaps between new parts. And the blank time between each new volume generates a world of speculation, minute scrutiny of the text, explosions of new spinoffs and alternate universes. Each successive pause has generated an exponential increase in these metaworlds of reading and rereading. And Rowling responds to this. (Though I am glad to see that she has not allowed it to unduly influence the stories themselves.)
Unlike us, future readers who someday buy the whole Harry Potter series will know the whole set of book titles in advance, just as we know all the chapter titles of OOTP now. Will their experience be different from ours? Yes.
Will it be diminished by knowing all 7 book titles at once? I don't think so. At most, they will know that Harry doesn't die in vol. 6, because they will be able to see in advance that vol. 7 is titled "Harry Potter and the Temple of Doom," not "The Order of the Phoenix Avenges Harry." Whereas we poor sods merely hope that such will be the case.
And with the complex relationship that has developed between the books and the reader (all the baroque layers of interaction between canon and non-canon, all the frenzy and urgency and desire, etc.), it is only to be expected that Rowling will make use of every tool available to her.
The chapter titles, and especially in the list of them that appears in the front of the book in the ToC, provide a space for one more little mindfuck of the reader.
On a practical level, a ToC has a real and effective purpose. It is part of the traditional structure of a book, like page numbers. One could argue that OOTP doesn't need page numbers either, since they only really become necessary when people write scholarly essays with footnotes that cite a passage by its page number.
But we are used to page numbers; the only secret they give away is that the book has a narrative sequential order: a beginning, middle, and end. (Except in the case of a few experimental novels like Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Cortazar's Hopscotch).
I too want to be surprised; I hate spoilers. (I cannot fathom those readers who read the end of a book first, because they hate the tension.) I tend not to read the ToC in advance. But in OOTP, I did read the ToC, with great amusement, seeing that in itself it contained a whole set of games, tricks, sleight-of-hand. Magic at work.
The best magicians, like Ricky Jay, always show the audience exactly what they're doing; it doesn't ruin the illusion; it makes the astonishment all the greater. Or so I think.
*/Grand Unified Theory*
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-27 01:59 pm (UTC)I seem to recall that Pullmans HDM series is similar (not even sure it has chapter titles), but that Coifer's Artemis Fowl and Pratchett's childrens Discworld books do.
On a slightly different point I find page numbers to be particularly unhelpful. The UK and US versions are of differing lengths (different print size?).
no subject
Date: 2003-06-27 03:19 pm (UTC)I suppose one question is: Did Rowling want her chapters to have titles or did the US editor ask her to add them? I suspect she could easily have refused, if she thought it was a problem. And if she wanted chapter titles, did she like or dislike having them listed at the front of the book?
If I had to guess, I'd say she didn't worry much about it either way. She wrote chapter titles that offered tantalizing atmospheric hints, but no real information. Some of them are humorous. And she undoubtedly wrote those chapter titles in the full knowledge that for 8.5 million readers (more, by now) they would be listed at the front.
I think UK children's books tend to have ToCs less often than US ones do. But as the English-language publishing world begins to globalize (or globalise), these traditions are likely to merge a bit more, because (aside from Rowling) the economies of scale that drive publishing are all in the direction of copublished single editions. I used to edit a series of books that were copublished in the US and UK and were aimed at a YA/Adult crossover market (same market as HP). The UK editor and I had hilarious conversations about what's called a "mid-Atlantic" style. We struck ridiculous bargains: I'll spell "color" without a "u" if you'll refer to a mother as a mum, not a mom, and so on.
Actually, the answer is that kids are more globalised than we think. We underestimate the ability of children to tolerate non-normative spellings and unfamiliar concepts such as "philosopher's stone."
As for page numbers, I haven't seen the UK edition of OOTP, but I assume that in the US ed. the print is slightly larger, or the margins are bigger, or the sinkage at the top of each chapter opener is deeper, or all three. When they reedited the text for US spellings, they also redesigned the book for US tastes. That's fairly common, especially with books that have a large YA market. (Hence the infamous change of title from Philosopher to Sorcerer.)Apparently Scholastic wasn't too worried about the added expense of an additional 100 pages.
Page numbers are going to be necessary, because you can bet there will be many scholarly essays written on HP (some of the panels at Nimbus are in that vein.) And it would be unethical for those authors to quote from Rowling without proper and complete citation. Which is why footnotes always give the publisher's city and name, as well as page nos. so that the reader knows which edition to go to in order to find the full passage.
More than you wanted to hear. What can I say? I'm bored at work.