Barthes was full of pretentious shit in my opinion. You don't have a story without the author and the author's molding of the characters. To think you could remove the author and his/her personal nuances on each character is impossible. It's what makes one style of writing different from the next and it's what makes most people follow an author's work. It's like suggesting the work comes from thin air.
Not to mention the fact that Barthes was basically snobbing it up by insisting that readers need not exhibit any pretense by trying to over-analyze a written work "behind the work's back," where there is no "official word" on the subject written into the piece BY the author. Look at the name of the essay. It was giving the text absolute authority, yes, but not so far as to completely dodge what an author has OUTRIGHT said about it.
It's important to to note that J.K. Rowling injected this tidbit about Dumbledore into her readers' minds
HERSELF. Let's not make the mistake of bringing her down to the level of a common, overzealous, fan. This isn't merely a bit of background information regarding her political views, which runs the risk of "tainting" our interpretation of her work. It's a direct statement (from the horse's mouth) about the story. She is the CREATOR of the character, the CREATOR of the world, and the AUTHOR (very much alive) of the books. She is the ultimate authority on the subject, and therefore, is immune to any criticism that her "personal" interpretation of the text is limiting. There is no feeble stretching for "unofficial" meaning, here.
Whether or not you buy into Roland's argument, the critical method he proposed doesn't really apply to this situation, as it isn't left up to vague interpretation any longer.
As for what makes something "canon," Firestreak ... you're clinging to a stubbornly restrictive definition of the word, and it's one that's not shared by the majority of fans of "modern-day" fiction.
In series that have numerous "expanded universes" and multiple writers (
Star Trek and
Star Wars being prime examples), what can and cannot be considered canonical does indeed get to be a bit hazy. If all known "official" written works are by the same writer, however, and if that creator is still living, his/her word
IS canon. For example: anything Robert Jordan said in interviews up until the point of his death about
The Wheel of Time (i.e., it doesn't matter if he managed to get around to writing it) is considered canon, both by the publisher (Tor) and by the fanbase. Nobody's going to argue with George Lucas about
Star Wars, or George R.R. Martin about
A Song of Ice and Fire ... likewise, you'd be a bloody fool to shout back in J. K. Rowling's face, "Nuh uh!" when she's trying to tell you something about Albus Dumbledore.
There's always that final phase at the end of a great Storyteller's saga, in which his rapt audience hammers the Sage with questions -- the "But what happened to 'Yadda-yadda'" phase. That's all J.K. Rowling was responding to -- once again, she called no press conference, and made no press release. It was an answer to question.
