Closing the Door on the Harry Potter Experience

Setting aside the existence of J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore this week marks the final week in which fans of the Harry Potter world can look forward to something new from the creators of one of the most successful fantasy franchises in history (and I am very much aware that J.K. Rowling doesn’t consider Harry Potter to be fantasy).

Several years ago I gave a TV interview as part of a promotion for my last book, Understanding Middle-earth. The reporter concluded the interview by asking me what I intended to do next. I was caught off guard by the question and suggested I might write about Harry Potter.

Since that time I have thought about what I might say concerning Harry Potter that others haven’t already said and truth be told it seems like all the cool Harry Potter stuff has been written. I don’t have much interest in writing traditional literary criticism, which drones on endlessly about sources, themes, the possible symbolic significance of a story, and how the story-teller might be trying to relate to the audience. I enjoy writing about the imaginary world a writer creates more than anything else.

The more detail an author provides about a world, the more easily one finds it to create and express a personal perspective within that world. We see these perspectives expressed through fan fiction, poetry, and art. And, of course, Pottermore seems to offer the opportunity for fans to express their perspectives of Harry Potter’s world. This may be the first widely sanctioned fan fiction movement. How do you top that?

Here at SF-Fandom we have published some Harry Potter fan fiction, including Rita Skeeter’s interview with Cornelius and her interview with Ginny Weasley Potter.

There may be more Rita Skeeter interviews waiting in the wings. Time will tell.

But it may be that some other interesting things will develop. For example, maybe there is room for some historical essays about events within Harry’s world that are not wiki-linked. The wiki model creates a lot of strong references for terms but it doesn’t support deep, in-depth exploration of a topic through a coherent essay.

For example, there appears to be nothing like a Journal of Harry Potter Studies. The logical next step for a fandom is to create semi-formal documents that search for meaning within the literure, or which attempt to document the structures of the literary world. Maybe as the Pottermore experience unfolds people will work together to create a journal that examines the social experience of the Pottermore sphere.

There are, of course, various books that seek to explain the roots of Harry Potter’s world in terms of our “real” world. Books such as The Sorcerer’s Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books behind the Hogwarts Adventures, and The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter have been published. These books attempt to introduce the search for sources to the Harry Potter audience and they have been received well enough.

But they’re not good introductions to the world of Harry Potter. People don’t want (perhaps cannot because of licensing and trademark issues) to invest their time in re-imagining the world as an outsider might perceive it. We are the outsiders. We have to explore that wonderful world alone, each of us in our minds. Sure, there are fan debates and forums but these discussions are chaotic, disorganized, and ultimately don’t provide coherence to what the reader can see.

We may, now that the final movie is being released, begin to see the fans begin exploring this collective viewpoint in new ways. That is, once the door closes on the official artistic expression of the world, the hunger for more will drive fans to seek out introspective discussions. They will want to know how the world of Harry Potter affected others in a thoughtful way.

Forum discussions don’t satisfy that desire very much. Fan fiction addresses the need a little bit. But I think the missing piece is the attempt to document and explain the world as if it were real in ways that the originator (J.K. Rowling) did not imagine.

Admittedly, being only an occasional visitor to the Harry Potter fan sites I’m hardly an expert on the fan point of view. Nonetheless, I haven’t seen the “take this for a fact” resources (beyond official works) that accompany other literary worlds. When professionally compiled and published books begin appearing — when readers across the world will be able to see an outsider’s insider view of Harry Potter’s world — we’ll have opened the door into a new phase of Harry Potter experiences.

That new phase may, however, be delayed or obscured by Pottermore. I suspect that the process of reinterpreting the world of Harry Potter may be stifled or deferred for many years. As long as our curiosity — our thirst for more — is being satisfied by officially sanctioned materials, the afterlife of the Harry Potter world cannot fully begin.

Perhaps what we’ll see shortly is a burst of new energy, new creativity unlike anything that the science fiction and fantasy (and literary) fan communities have seen before.

One has to wonder what Rita Skeeter and her friends would make of that.