Really, I think the Potter series had even more of an effect than I thought it did. Check out this assignment from one of my classes a while back. The course was a sociology class, Cultural Consumption, and this project was called the "cultural autobiography." Here's what I turned in:
The Potterverse
In the fifth grade, a girl named Amber Britman loaned me my first Harry Potter book. It was actually the second volume in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and I’ll never forget the high-and-mighty, take-a-number way that she said to me, “Someone else is already borrowing book one, but you’ll be fine starting with the second book.” She could get away with this mighty high-ness, since she was the only student in the whole fifth grade class that owned the books. (Most parents at my Christian school were very much against them. They cited something about witchcraft, no matter how fictional, being the “work of the devil!” or some such nonsense.)
I don’t remember the actual act of reading the book, but my mother would later tell me that she didn’t really see my face for days—she says I didn’t resurface until I had finished it. My ten year-old self must have figured out how to eat meals, do chores, and even bathe all with one hand, since apparently, I did not put down Harry Potter for anything. And that’s how my life remained for the next three years. I didn’t have to borrow another book from Amber, since my mother gifted the first four books to me for my next birthday, and until the start of eighth grade, I did nothing but read and re-read the Harry Potter books.
At the age of twelve, I had enjoyed the first Harry Potter movie, but more than anything, I could not wait for the next book to come out—I had heard that there were going to be seven of them total, and it was my personal, expert opinion that the fifth was taking entirely too long. I had studied the four published books in the way that law students study the United States Constitution, and I knew facts from it just as well as chemistry researchers know the periodic table. I could recite passages from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban better than I could recite verses from the Bible, and had I shared that fact with anyone, it would have been quite the scandal, since I still attended Christian school at the time. But suddenly, re-reading my four books and waiting patiently for the next installment was not enough for me, which is why at the start of my eighth grade year in August 2002, something changed about the way I consumed the Harry Potter series.
One school afternoon during the eighth grade lunch period, I sneaked onto the school library computers to ask Jeeves[i] what he knew about the next Harry Potter book. After running into a cornucopia of rumors regarding release dates and possible book titles, I entered a more specific search to find out if anyone (other than J.K. Rowling) knew what was going to happen next. Still, I found nothing. No one seemed to have any idea where the Potterverse would be headed in the next book, but there were user forums on harrypotter.com where people discussed which Hogwarts[ii] house they would like to join, picked favorite Harry Potter characters, and wrote stories about what they thought would be in store for everyone in the next book. I quickly replaced my religious re-reading of the actual books with visiting those forums and reading the stories written by other users, called “fan fiction”.
(The next three sections span over the same period of time, beginning at this particular spot in time, when I began reading fan fiction, and continuing to present day.)
Harry Potter and the Finding of Friends
There were very few instances in which I tried to share the way I enjoyed the Harry Potter series with anyone. Not only was the concept of fan fiction difficult to explain, but the entire Potter series itself was not very popular at school. Any mention of the books or movies often led to uncouth declarations that “Harry Potter is gay!” or a variety of “My parents don’t let me read them” statements from classmates. So, for the time being, I shared my enthusiasm with no one outside of my online contemporaries in the harrypotter.com forums.
After the eighth grade, I left the private K-12 Christian school and enrolled into a public high school where I quickly found out that I was not at all as alone as I had previously thought. My first day of public school, I met another Potter fan in homeroom. Our conversation did not begin with the Potterverse, but once we realized that we both read the books and watched the movies, we seemed to share a deeper understanding with each other. The girl’s name was Jharmari, and she would become one of my closest friends. A particularly poignant moment during the initial formation of our friendship was when I tried to explain fan fiction to her, and it turned out that she already knew what it was! Jharmari knew more about fan fiction than I did, and she introduced me to fan art and better sites for sharing fiction online.
The same sort of shared identification happened with two other now close friends, Andrea and Chris. Andrea and I met in a tenth grade world history class and became fast friends by relating parts of the Harry Potter series to the events and facts we learned in the history class. I did not get to know Chris until much later, but our first conversation only took place because she knew that I was a Harry Potter fan.
The formation of these relationships can relate to Sharon Zukin’s piece on learning how to shop (2004). She writes a section about how the consumption becomes a conversation piece, and although my friends and I were not consuming in shopping malls or boutique stores, the concept still applies (2004). I made friends with these people, largely due to the fact that we were Harry Potter consumers, and so the evidence of our consumption fit easily into our conversations. We spoke freely, because our conversations consisted of the topics that we found most interesting, things that interested us, and the subject “[provided] us with news and conversation when we [ran] out of things to say” about school (Point of Purchase, 2004: 52).
For Zukin, the conversation surrounding a particular type of consumption boils down to the idea that "by talking about our responses to goods, we're explaining the topic that ultimately interests us most" (Point of Purchase, 2004: 52). That is, when my friends and I spoke to each other about the Potter series, we talked about more that just the series and how we consumed it, since in sharing this information, we ultimately told each other about ourselves. By using shared knowledge from the series, we spoke in a special language that only we could understand.
Through Jharmari in particular, my fan network expanded to others in the school that I would not have otherwise known. They were mostly art students who participated in the fan world in some way or another, usually through fan art and fan fiction. One of the most interesting aspects about that group of students is that our collective tastes were very diverse within the fantasy genre. Whereas I only knew the Harry Potter series in depth, others in the circle of friends knew a variety of other media in the genre, like other fantasy book series, fantasy movies, and most notably, manga and anime[iii].
Again referring back to Zukin, she writes a great deal about the importance of expertise within the arena of consumption—in fact, she found that the knowledge gained from shopping is often more important than the actual acquisition of goods (2004). Of course, this dynamic is even more pronounced in the context of Harry Potter and other products of the fantasy genre, since evaluation of an individual’s expertise is already heavily knowledge based. That is to say, the acquisition of material goods, such as the books or collectibles, has some value, but it is negligible as compared to other types of consumption, such as shopping. The real value lies in what a person knows and the way he or she can converse about it.
This knowledge, or cultural capital, was the currency for status and rank among our like-minded peers (Zukin 2004). The possession of cultural capital, or lack of it in my case, was very important in the group. The more knowledge one possessed of all the different aspects of the entire genre, the more integrated that person became in the group. And though I was heavy into the fan culture of the one Harry Potter arena, I still did not possess the same level of capital that others had, and I therefore tended to be on the outer edges.
Even though I remained on the fringes of the group, it is also interesting to consider the idea of being “included” at all. The people who tended to associate themselves with belonging to this particular collection of people were also those who seemed to have the greatest aspirations for individuality within our high school. Looking back, it is clear that many of us seemed to carry very defined identities that we projected through the ways we dressed, through the ideas we professed as personal beliefs, and through labels we chose to apply to our identities. Still, despite all of the distinctions we made as individuals, we all chose to call ourselves part of the larger network and group of friends. We were the poster children for Postrel’s idea of selective conformity (2003).
Each of us took part in this “mix of meaning and pleasure, of group affiliation and individual taste” (Substance of Style, 2003: 97). In my own case, I sought to handle the dichotomy between distinction and conformity by joining many different groups—I looked to conform to many different ideas, knowing that the end product would be a unique mix of all of them. In addition to being in the “fantasy/artsy” social group, I was part of the “nerdy science” group, the “marching band” group, and the “musician” group. The affiliations are simple enough to understand, but in turn, my individual taste began leaning toward all things “cosmopolitan,” or anything that would identify me as a person of many tastes, interests, and social capacities. This very scattered, unfocused set of interests likely contributed to me remaining on the outer edges of most of the groups with which I associated myself.
Harry Potter and the Culture of Premiere
So let’s backtrack a bit to midway through my eighth grade school year in January 2003, when I finally received news of the release date for the fifth book installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This was huge. I had gotten hooked on fan fiction; I had read the fourth book at least eight times, all in the anticipation of being able to eventually read this book that would finally be out in June. It was like being lost in a desert, and after drinking from mirages for so long, I finally caught sight of a true source of water. The next six months could not pass quickly enough for me, but eventually they did, and June 21, 2003 brought my first Harry Potter premiere night.
The first important thing to realize about the midnight book premiere is that it did not begin at midnight—it started days in advance, when bookstores (mostly corporations such as Borders and Barnes & Noble) opened the queue to reserve a midnight release copy of the book. After my mom took me to get our reservation, we made the terrible mistake of assuming that we could just show up at midnight and pick it up. People were packed and squeezed into the two-level bookstore, forming a line that snaked all the way from the front counter, through the bookshelves, and past the restrooms in the back. We arrived at midnight, but others had been there since eight o’clock that evening, and it was not until 1:30 AM that my mom and I left Borders bookstore with a copy of the new Potter book in hand. You would think that we had learned our lesson for future premieres, but the 2005 book premiere for the next installment (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) went in a similar fashion.
I did not get it right until the summer of 2007, which held not just one, but two Potter premieres: the fifth movie (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) premiered in June, and then the last book (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) hit shelves in July. By that time, I was well integrated into a group of friends who likewise wished to enjoy the book release festivities, so we all participated together. We even dubbed 2007 as the “year of the premiere,” since along with the more obvious premieres (like the third Spiderman and Pirates of the Caribbean movies on top of the Potter premieres), most of us were also set to make our own debuts at many different colleges and universities that August.
The Order of the Phoenix movie premiere was the first time that I was able to actually take in the madness of a premiere night. I finally got to see all the people who turned out in the hours leading up to the midnight showing, all dressed as characters or simply in the spirit of the series. Though my friends and I had never dressed up before, we were inspired to do so for the last book premiere, and we have done so for every movie premiere since.
Two years later, the Half-Blood Prince movie premiere went similarly to Order of the Phoenix, and even served as a reunion of sorts for all of us college students who were home for the summer of 2009, when it was released. Most recently, part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows premiered on November 19, 2010, for which a friend and I actually made the four-hour road trip from Vanderbilt to my hometown in order to catch the midnight showing with the old crowd. There is only one more remaining Potter premiere, part two of Deathly Hallows, which is to be released in the summer of 2011.
The best part about Potter premiere night, whether for a book release or movie opening, is that everyone is there for the same (or at least highly similar) reasons. For instance, you would be hard pressed at premiere night to find a person who has never seen any of the movies or read any of the books. All together, the attendees of a premiere generate what Emile Durkheim would call a collective effervescence, in which there is a “shared feeling of identity in which the individual members of the group (whether tribe or a congregation) experience waves of emotion, a sense of unity and togetherness” (Friday Night Lights, 2010: 26). Just as sports fans cheer for teams by wearing jerseys and team colors, promoting mascots and hanging banners, Potter fans do the same, sporting Hogwarts house attire, or round glasses paired with a lightning bolt scar[iv]. They treat premiere nights as their time to do the same, proudly participating in this “ritual of solidarity,” all for the rare opportunity to “feel gigantic and mythic, greater than the sum of their parts,” as David Grazian would say (Friday Night Lights, 2010: 28).
One interesting take on these nights is the idea that the film premieres provided (and still do provide) a deeper collective experience than did the book releases. The book release nights were still wonderful examples of Grazian’s rituals of solidarity (2010). However, the collective excitement of the book release night peaked once the first person received his or her copy—after that moment, the collective portion of the experience came quickly to a close, and all the fans left the bookstore to immerse themselves in the text. For the film premieres, the attendees experience the product together, all at the same time. When Harry says something funny, they all laugh; when Voldemort[v] raises his wand to kill an innocent woman, they all cringe; when a woman unexpectedly transforms into a snake, they all scream; when a beloved character dies at the end, they all feel sad. While it is possible that these reactions still occurred for those people reading the book by themselves (especially following the excitement of a midnight release, while the heightened sense of solidarity was still in tact), the fact remains that readers experienced the books by themselves and at their own tempos. But on movie premiere nights, each fan is surrounded by a huge stadium-style auditorium jam packed with other fans who are experiencing the same things, and so those waves of emotion that characterize collective effervescence are intensified.
When it comes down to it, Potter premiere nights are the culmination of art as experiencing the film. The collective effervescence experienced by viewers, combined with the initial fascination that fuels the fandom, links the work of art itself with the experience that fans have when they attend a premiere night. From the John Dewey perspective, on premiere night, the work of art (the film) becomes synonymous with the attendees and the event itself, and transcends the tendency for art to be “isolated from the human condition” (Art as Experience, 2005; 2).
Harry Potter and the Fiction of Fans
So once more, returning to the point when I began reading fan fiction, I would like to explore this wide arena within the fandom that has undoubtedly had the heaviest impact on my life as a Harry Potter consumer and fan. At the time, I had no idea that beginning to read fan fiction would become a cornerstone in my story, or that actually reading and writing it would become a staple of my identity. This is perhaps best explained by Jenkins, who explores “textual poaching,” a term coined by De Certeau, in his 1992 article, “Television Fans, Poachers, Nomads”:
The fans’ response typically involves not simply fascination or adoration but also frustration and antagonism, and it is the combination of the two responses which motivates their active engagement with the media. Because popular narratives often fail to satisfy, fans must struggle with them, to try original works. Because the texts continue to fascinate, fans cannot dismiss them from their attention but rather must try to find ways to salvage them for their interests. Far from syncopathic, fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions. In the process, fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts; instead, they become active participants in the construction and circulation on textual meanings. (P. 508).
We take different elements of the series—the characters, the setting, the plotline—and we craft them into our own. On one end of the spectrum, some fan writers follow a strict interpretation of the aspects in the series and produce works of fan fiction that could very well be additional volumes in the series. On the other end, there are writers who mix ideas, change story elements, and mold the fiction into an end product nearly unrecognizable in relation to the original series. There are even those who write themselves into their stories, bringing an exclusively ludic interpretation to the art form (Alexander 2003). However, even with the sweeping differences of interpretation, the fact remains that every fan author writes because of what has been left unsaid in the original work. In that vein, it seems that Harry Potter fans are of a special breed, particularly those who began reading or writing fiction before the series was completed. Knowing for certain that there was more of the story that remained untold, fans took matters into their own hands and out of their own imaginations.
For me, fan fiction has taken the shape of a journey. I only began reading it as a temporary answer to my burning curiosity about the hitherto unreleased continuation of the series. I was still a consumer, seeking to consume more, albeit from a different source. This phenomenon is explained spectacularly by Jenkins, using the association of frustration paired with fascination that eventually leads to involvement in fandom (1992). Quickly after I began, however, participating in the fan world was not only about reading and consumption. For the first time since I started reading the Potter books, I had a community of other like-minded fans who interacted with the original text in the same way that I did, and it was that which inspired me to produce.
In addition to allowing fans to interact creatively with the text, the mostly online-based space for fan fiction provides an even more open place for expression. The case is often that writers of fan fiction also writers in the more traditional sense, be it original fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and so on. Similar to the section on finding friends because of Harry Potter, there is a certain amount of cultural capital expected within this deep level of the fandom. in this sense, one of the best comparisons would be the film High Fidelity, in which the role of expertise is heavily stressed, and the most important resource to an individual is the knowledge that he or she possesses (2000). Fandom is, as Zukin would say, “an exercise in connoisseurship” (Point of Purchase, 2004: 41).
Harry Potter and the Story of my Life
When I tell people just how much of a Potter head I actually am, their faces never fail to produce an award-winning look of utter shock. I suppose I was not blessed with the geeky, fantasy-genre aura about me. “You’re insane,” they say. “You drove four hours and back in one night, just to see a movie with your friends?” And of course, I know how it sounds, but the only way to respond is truthfully with, “Yes. Yes, I did.”
With more time, it would me interesting to explore the differences between consumption and production within the Harry Potter fan world, and fandom in general. Particularly, Jenkins poses a poignant question in his writing: “What do poachers keep?” In asking this, he challenges De Certeau’s claim that members of fandom tend to borrow culture; that they steal it from a source that fascinates them, use it as they would like, and then discard that culture, never keeping or owning any of it for themselves. Jenkins finds issue with this claim, asserting that these “poachers” do indeed keep pieces of culture and often make insightful and complicated connections as “arbiters of potential change and development” (Television Fans, Poachers, Nomads, 1992: 520).
Another topic I would enjoy exploring further would be that of selective conformity, and the possible effects of selecting to conform to many different things. I briefly looked into this as an explanation for not possessing the cultural capital to exist within the core of the fan network at my high school. It would also be interesting to look at the identity ambivalence that may have resulted.
Boiled down, the Harry Potter series is nothing but the coming-of-age story of a magical boy who has to take down the big, evil, bad guy. The plot is unoriginal, the message is stock and uninspired, and the series is arguably six volumes too long. But the whole of the Potterverse, flaws and all, becomes so much more than that when it is turned into an experience—and whether it is through fostering relationships, promoting premiere culture, or encouraging deeper interaction and creativity with a text, creating experience is exactly what the fandom does.
Harry Potter and the Works Cited
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, 2005.
Grazian, David. Mix It Up: Popular Culture, Mass Media, and Society. New York: W.W. Norton,
2010.
High Fidelity. Dir. Stephen Frears. Perf. John Cusack. Disney's Touchstone Pictures, 2000. DVD.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge,
1992.
Postrel, Virginia I. The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking
Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York: Perennial, 2004.
Zukin, Sharon. Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. New York:
Routledge, 2004.
[i] Now Ask.com, Ask Jeeves was an online search engine founded in 1996.
[ii] Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the magical school that Harry and his friends attend. Students are separated into four houses based on dominant personality traits.
[iii] “Manga” is literally the Japanese word for “comic book,” and generally refers to comics from Japan. “Anime” refers to the style of animation that is heavily influenced by manga.
[iv] Harry Potter’s trademark: he wears perfectly round glasses, and has a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his forehead.
[v] The bad guy.
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