Here is the text of
the seven-minute talk I gave as one of five panelists at the Harry
Potter, Brands of Magic colloquium at the Sauder School of Business at the
University of British Columbia on October 29, 2015.
I first taught Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
here at UBC in the winter term of 2002, in a course, not on children’s
literature, but on cultural theory, as a sort of case study around the impacts
and interpretation of popular media. With the publication of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in
2000, and the release of the first Harry Potter film in November, 2001, the
publishing industry phenomenon arguably passed its tipping point, and Harry
Potter became a name – and a literary brand – that garnered global recognition
in the media. In the opening chapter of the first book, as the infant Harry is
being delivered to Privet Drive (you all know the story), the wizard Albus
Dumbledore tells his colleague at Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall, that he has
written a letter to the Dursleys that will enable them “to explain everything
to him when he’s older.” “Really Dumbledore,” Professor McGonagall replies,
“You
think you can explain all this in a letter? These people will never understand
him! He’ll be famous – a legend – I wouldn’t be surprised if today was known as
Harry Potter day in future – there will be books written about Harry – every
child in our world will know his name!” (15)
I can’t help but hear
this passage as J. K. Rowling articulating a playful fantasy of literary
success, as she sits unknown and unpublished scribbling in a notebook in The
Elephant House tea shop in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s. This passage not only
proves to be strangely and accurately prophetic, but it also sets up what I take
to be the core quandary of the whole series of books “written about Harry”: how
to understand him, how to read “Harry Potter.” That problem of knowing is
positioned initially here as a dichotomy, a choice between worlds: magical or
Muggle, Hogwarts or Privet Drive. But we have to recognize that, unpleasant as
the Dursleys are, Professor McGonagall is also off the mark herself: Harry
doesn’t so much choose as negotiate or mediate between those two poles. He
enables us, if you think about it, to read our way between the everyday and the
fantastical. Harry both enacts and embodies a specific set of reading
practices, a literacy; knowing his name means working to acquire that
competence, that mobility, that literacy.
In the three or so minutes that remain,
I’m going to sketch out three key aspects of that literacy, of what the Harry
Potter literary brand represents. Those three aspects of reading – you might
call them diagonals through this book, mediating between magical and Muggle
being – are the material, the heuristic and the haptic.
[The
Material]
When the Dursleys try to escape the
onslaught of Hogwarts admission letters addressed to Harry, they end up in “the
most miserable little shack you could imagine,” on what Rowling describes as “a
large rock way out to sea” (37). Significantly, both Dudley and his father are
certain that, whatever else, “there was no television in there.” Hagrid, as you
all know, still hand-delivers the letter to Harry amid flashes of lightening –
echoes, perhaps, of the scar on Harry’s forehead. Manuscript, signed text
inscribed on paper, is consistently counterpoised to electronic media,
especially television. (There is no TV at Hogwarts. Mass media, complete with
moving images, is displaced into the wizarding newspaper The Daily Prophet, an assemblage of stories, gossip and propaganda
that requires reading rather than viewing.) Magic, especially spells, appear to
require a return to the material object of the page, the book. And in 2001, too,
despite its commercial refiguring in Hollywood movies, “Harry Potter” seemed to
represented a resurgence of reading and of book-buying, an antidote to screen
and network. Books, as circulating and consumed objects, stood for a particular
intimate reactivation of the readerly imagination.
[The
Heuristic]
That reactivation is also figured in
the books themselves as heuristic: Harry, Hermione and Ron solve problems by
learning to be engaged readers. They decode text (as with the mirror of Erised,
for example), text we’re meant, arguably, to decode along with them. We’re
invited, you could say, to solve the books. But it's worth noting that Rowling
doesn’t offer up singular solutions, or “correct” answers. She doesn’t keep
silent because, following Professor McGonagall, that readers can’t understand,
can’t cross into the hermetic realm of magical privilege. Rather, it’s because
the process of puzzling out what Harry means to discover is pluralistic and
divergent. You might recall the Hogwarts school song, which declares that we
will “learn until our brains all rot,” is not choral so much as “bellowed”
cacophony, with everyone picking their own favourite tune: an enactment of
differential community, a solution that won’t resolve or homogenize.
[The
Haptic]
Harry
Potter doesn’t so much refuse electronic media as reinsert a haptic interface,
through the material technology of the book, into the various circuits of
public consumption. Books are tactile; they have to be handled, touched, their
pages turned. The demise of Quirrell (and the name suggests, aside from
quarrelsomeness, a quire, a fold of pages within a book) has to do with his
incapacity to read Harry, to interpret what Harry embodies or even to see the
mark of Harry’s mother’s love on his skin. That mark, as Dumbledore tells us,
is “not a scar” and leaves “no visible sign” (216). The haptic feedback – the
touch – that proves to be “agony” for Voldemort and Quirrell isn’t something
that we, as readers, need fear – we’re protected, in a sense, by the opaque surface,
the skin, of the pages before us. But it functions, nonetheless, as a form of
transmission, an ionizing, organic ether, that the lightning-bolt scar on
Harry’s forehead metonymically displaces and displays. The transformative power
of that touch, the shift from the distracted reception of screened images to
the proactive thoughtful connection to a living world, is what reading Harry
Potter might just be about.
