My friend Julia and I leave the table at the Mexican restaurant, say goodbye to a group of teenagers and their illicit margaritas, and dash off down the street. It’s a Friday in June in New York City, and we have somewhere to be by midnight.
We know we’re near our destination when we see the line snaking more than halfway around the block. But this is no rock star appearance, movie opening or audition for a reality TV show. Instead, the crowd waits for Barnes and Noble to open its doors, so we can be among the first in the country to turn the pages of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Around us in the line are dozens of little kids, some wearing capes and carrying brooms in homage to Harry, Hermione and their gang. But we don’t feel out of place—sharply-dressed, fast-talking New York yuppies abound as well, and even a few 17-year-olds like us. Potter-mania has struck the entire Upper West Side, judging by the size of the crowd. Julia and I leave the store each wearing a pair of plastic-rimmed Potter glasses and clutching our 750-odd page treasures to our chests. Harry (and not the margaritas) has made this night a thrilling one.
Five months later, it’s the night before Halloween and two days before my still-unfinished Harvard application is due. The next morning, our entire senior class will show up to school in costume. While some are donning Backstreet Boys and Baywatch outfits, my friends and I are making our purple capes and spray painting our broomsticks silver. With the anxiety of senior year upon me, Harry is even more bewitching. The application waits until my costume is done.
Another year later, and I’m trying to get back from the Harvard-Yale game with a nasty hangover at 6 p.m. My brother and I have spent an hour and a half in the cold trying to wheedle our way on to one of the rare UC buses. I’m grumpy, miserable and freezing, but I have a secret weapon for the bus ride: the first Harry Potter book tucked safely under my arm. Though I’ve read it before, the movie is coming out soon and I want to refresh my Potter savvy before I see it on the big screen. I spend the next few hours on the bus as warm as if I’ve had a glass of Butterbeer (Harry’s favorite drink) at a Quidditch (the official sport of witches) match. Harry has done it again. I decide to re-read the entire series.
Perhaps you know some Potterites, for lack of a better term, like me. A lot of us, whether we trumpet it or delight secretly, walk among you.
True Potter fans have crushes on one or two of the minor characters. It’s not acceptable to just have a crush on Harry. Everyone loves Harry. No, to be hardcore you have to get more intimate with the characters. A friend of mine idolizes Lee Jordan, the rarely-mentioned Quidditch announcer, while I prefer the scraggly Professor Lupin, despite his tendency to turn into a wolf at inopportune moments.
Potterites spend time speculating in detail about what events will unfold in books five, six and seven, and struggle over Harry’s family tree to link him to the evil, unshakable Voldemort. (“Maybe Voldemort’s third cousin was Harry’s aunt.”) They are slightly unhinged by Harry, and they know it.
When it comes to describing my own affection for Potter, I’d say I fall somewhere in between fan and fanatic. I’ve read the series twice, and seen the first movie twice. When we were in London, Julia and I took a picture at platform nine of King’s Cross Station, where Harry departs for at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And I definitely plan to see the Chamber of Secrets sometime in the next few weeks, though I won’t be lining up tomorrow when the movie comes out. I’ll save that level of obsession that for the fifth book, which by the way is driving me crazy with anticipation.
As an English concentrator who’s actually chosen the concentration in order to read Chaucer, Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare, I occasionally wonder how I can justify the fact that I’d throw all the classics down in a second if a new Potter book appeared. But then I’m in English, after all, because I love to read. I love thinking about reading and about why we read and why authors write. That’s hardly incongruous with my week-kneed affection for a fictional 12-year old wizard.
So I’m not ashamed. In fact, I have a theory about it all. I think Harry Potter has brought us back to the original purpose of popular literature. When we argue about the meaning of “true” in line 23 of Great Work X, we easily forget much of literature’s original purpose: to take readers out of their lives and metaphorically move them somewhere else. Today, movies fill the “art as virtual travel” function in our society. But Harry Potter has reclaimed that role for reading.
The other day, poet Peter Richards came as a guest to my poetry class, and we asked him what he thought defined good poetry. He said that for him it was a feeling of transport, “like you felt when you were a kid and you first opened The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
Aha, I thought. Narnia isn’t much of a leap to Hogwarts.
I’m not arguing that Harry Potter is actual poetry. But it does have that transporting quality, and not just because it’s a page-turner. J.K. Rowling has given our world the gift of another world, a completely fantastic place with enough parallels to our world that it makes us think. Many contemporary books are intensely personal, intensely subjective and intensely cynical—not the kind of books one can read on a smelly bus ride home from Yale. But Harry Potter hit the spot; it was absorbing, satisfying and wholly escapist. And the mobs outside stores that June night are proof that my experience with the book is a common one.
I know an eight-year-old who cried bitterly when he realized that Hogwarts wasn’t real and he could never actually get on the train and go there. How different is his experience really from the feeling one gets when putting down a good novel—say, Pride and Prejudice—or watching the curtain fall at the end of The Tempest?
We feel as though we’ve lost a friend; we go to sleep and dream that we’re at Pemberly or on Prospero’s island. The next day we get up and ask ourselves about Austen or Shakespeare’s portrayal of love, good and evil, friendship or forgiveness.
Harry does all of these things to his young and would-be young readers. After reading a Potter chronicle, they dream that they are on the Quidditch field or climbing through a portrait at the top of a spiral staircase. They wish desperately that they could talk to Harry. They also think about evil in the book: an evil that never disappears, but remains a constant for sequel after sequel, gaining strength in times of complacency.
This semi-intellectual defense of a kid’s book is perhaps a way of excusing the sparkly purple cape in my closet at home, or the way the pages of my four brightly-colored Potter books are lovingly smudged and worn while my Shakespeare reading remains woefully untouched. But I’m not alone. The weekend after I bought the fourth book, I saw countless grown-up muggles (what witches call people) carrying it on the subway or on the New York City street, and knew that when we opened the pages, we were all going to the same place.
Sarah M. Seltzer ’05 lives in Lowell House. While her favorite Hogwarts professor is a werewolf, her favorite Harvard professor is the un-wolf-like Elisa New.
