JK Rowling and the Cauldron of Discourse
by Sam Kriss
Please understand that I’m not making any kind of criticism of her when I say that JK Rowling has abandoned the real world. When you have one billion dollars, it’s not really something you need any more; there’s no real need to explain why she chooses to live with magic instead. If nothing else, she inhabits herself. In Edinburgh’s rain-splattered streets familiar beings are at work. The troll in chains, for instance, grunting behind the wheel of the bus, pressed into its dreary service shuttling endlessly from Hanover Street to Holyrood and back by a simple first-year spell, Instrumentio, for the manipulation of hyponoiacs – because why else would the Lothian number 6 have ploughed so carelessly into that puddle just as she was walking past? You might think that Ocado being out of smoked salmon for three weeks running is a supply-chain problem, another of those market inefficiencies that together determine the course of our lives, but she knows better: when she scans down her receipt to see it replaced by mackerel again, she knows it’s an infestation of nifflers, scurrying rapacious all along the warehouse floor, snuffling up anything that looks like it might be valuable, cramming thick slices of translucent rippling salmon into their always-hungry bellies. When helicopters thrum overhead to ruin her sleep at three in the morning, JK Rowling knows that a werewolf’s on the loose; when politically engaged young people mass in front of Parliament she sees the crowded hoods of the Dementors, and shivers.
Things continue to work after their usual fashion; it’s house-elves in their willing legions that stitched all her clothes together, and worryingly megarhinic goblins judiciously sliding banknotes to her through the cash machine. She’s grateful for the advice of Hagrid and Dumbledore and all the others as they follow her around this greyed-out half-world, she’s glad that she’s not like all the boring and stupid people, that she has an active imagination and a rich inner life. Of course she knows that all these wizards and griffins are just stuff that she made up, that none of it is really real, that she prefers living with them because she can control it all to the last detail, while even one billion dollars won’t let you rearrange the universe at will. But things aren’t always so clear. She’s sure, occasionally, that Harry had always been there, telling her what to do. He told her to write the book. Then she went back into the house and wrote, It was nearly midnight, and Harry Potter was lying on his stomach in bed. It was not nearly midnight. Harry Potter was not lying on his stomach in bed.
This is about JK Rowling’s political interventions, of course, her pathological tendency to justify vague and insipid reaction by pointing out that some fictional wizards she thought up inside her own head also share her views, her apparent inability to think about the real world without first mapping it onto the one she invented. JK Rowling has variously pissed off Scottish nationalists and the Palestine solidarity movement and the Labour left, wielding a Dumbledore hand puppet that repeats everything she says in a slightly lower voice, but she’s also pissed off a significant number of her own fans, and that’s where you have to start.
In 2007, Rowling was widely celebrated for announcing that her character Dumbledore was gay, despite the fact that there’s nothing to suggest this in the text itself, where she had an opportunity to actually advocate for queer issues; this year, when she told her fans that their personal theories were all incorrect and another character, Sirius Black, was not gay, they were outraged. We grew up with these characters, they insisted, we decide how to read them. JK Rowling is over, they declared, as if she hadn’t already been dead since Barthes. (Or longer: there’s a reason every testament is final, why God never actively intervenes in the world once His holy book is set down, why the medieval Kabbalists had to invent reader-response theory and the Catholic Church headcanons.) What’s clear is that absolutely nobody involved has ever read a word of Derrida.
There are many definitions of deconstruction, none of them particularly good, but you could do worse than to describe it as a mode of reading that refuses to forget the textuality of the text, the fact that it’s a series of marks on a material substrate that were written and which can be read, copied, misunderstood, ignored, or destroyed, that before it conjures up a private universe it exists as a shared object in this one. As a sop to her LGBT+ critics, Rowling shortly afterwards revealed that in her books lycanthropy is actually a metaphor for AIDS. Her position on all this is clear: she came up with these stories, she owns them, and long after they’ve slipped into the wider discourse they still remain essentially hers, essentially private. On Twitter, her header image was briefly two lines of text reading ‘I know what Dumbledore would do. Deal with it.’ The true text of Harry Potter is not on the printed page, but between her ears, to be altered whenever she wants; in her Platonist cosmology fictional events have a shining reality that is all their own, which emanates from out her mouth. She’s following the fandom-headcanon model of literary theory, but here hers is the largest, most bloated head, and the only one that counts. It’s impossible to read this denial of the text anything other than an abrogation of her rights and duties as an author. Sometimes dedicated fans whip themselves up into such a frenzy over their favourite culture-commodities that they act as if the stories were real, centring themselves in a private world that does not belong to them, and JK Rowling does the exact same thing. As soon as she moves to keep hold of her creation, it gains a terrifying, spectral autonomy. JK Rowling is not the author of the Harry Potter books; she is their biggest fan.
It’s in this context that Rowling’s bizarre forays into politics, her marshalling of the powers of literary enchantment for the most banal and miserable of mundane causes, start to make a kind of sense. When she stridently opposed the academic boycott of Israel called for by Palestinian civil society, she did so through a lengthy exegesis on the moral message of her own books, eventually concluding that BDS is wrong because the magical wizards wouldn’t like it. (To be fair, she admits that Harry might have started out with natural pro-Palestine sympathies, but maintains that by the end of the last book he would have grown up and learned to accept that Israel has a right to exist.) When Britain voted to leave the European Union, her public response was that she’d ‘never wanted magic more,’ presumably so she could cast a spoiling spell on millions of ballots. Her opposition to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn seems to be based on the usual confused half-ideas about electability, as if the party’s right wing and its generic brand of watered-down Toryism hadn’t shown itself to be a losing proposition twice in the last decade, but it’s mostly supported by the fact that, as she insisted, ‘Corbyn. Is. Not. Dumbledore.’ Which is true: Jeremy Corbyn simply isn’t as good as the wise old magician who doesn’t exist, having shown himself to be entirely incapable of casting even the most basic of spells, and utterly failed to function as a universally adored avatar of infallible good; he’s capable of occasionally holding views contrary to those of JK Rowling even when she doesn’t want him to, and he didn’t even have the good grace to give her one billion dollars. None of this is, strictly speaking, analogy; in almost every case she’s responding to other, lesser fans to say that their analogies are inadmissible. In analogy a fictional scenario acts as a map for real events; something intersubjective and mutually agreed upon can explicate (or, if you know how to do it right, confuse) an objective situation. For Rowling, the situation is reversed: real events are trespassing on her characters, the real world is only an imperfect map for Harry Potter.
Rowling’s politics didn’t create those of the Harry Potter fantasy – she is, remember, not an author but a fan. Instead, the books themselves distilled all the latent fascism out of the political mainstream, boiling the discourse into a heavy green slime, and she drank it all down in one gulp. People sometimes try to play a fun game in which they match the Hogwarts houses to political ideologies, usually ending up with a ranked list of what ideas they like and don’t like (Gryffindors are nice social liberals like me! Donald Trump is a Voldemort!). This is the wrong way of looking at it; any division into types must itself exemplify a particular type, so that the four together express a single Weltanschauung. Gryffindor are fascists according to fascist ideology itself, the ideal-ego of the fascist subject: a natural elite, strong, noble, honourable, yellow-haired, and respectful of difference, but only within strict limits. Slytherin is the same figure as she appears to the outside world, her negative aspects projected onto a despised other. Hufflepuff is the fascist’s ideal ordinary political subject, dull and stolid, but essentially good-hearted; Ravenclaw is the indeterminate other that resists assimilation into this conceptual matrix, the thing that constitutes the order through its exclusion, the figure that in the early twentieth century was identified with the body of the Jew.
Harry Potter is a profoundly reactionary fable; its fantasy isn’t really about dragons and broomsticks but the tired old fantasy of the British class system. Harry Potter is the petit-bourgeois boy who goes to a magical Eton (one that, incidentally, runs on actual slave-labour), faces a few tribulations along his way, but eventually finds himself admitted to the ranks of the aristocracy. The central moral dilemma is one of inequality – what do you do when you have one class of people who, by dint of their extraordinary powers, are innately superior to the society surrounding them? (This goes some way to explaining its popularity: Harry Potter is a book for people who are very pleased with themselves because they love books and love to read, without any judgements on what’s being read; it was never for children and always for the bored 29-year-old human resources workers they would grow into. To read Harry Potter uncritically is to adopt the posture of a Hufflepuff.) The crude, cartoon fascism of Voldemort and the Death Eaters answers that they must rule, killing and enslaving the lesser races. The good characters, meanwhile, want the wizarding world to coil up into its own superiority and seethe in its own ressentiment; every adult is seemingly employed by a government bureaucracy whose sole purpose is to maintain a system of magical apartheid. But remember that these are not actually opposing factions, only varying perspectives of a single ideological object; the difference between Dumbledore and Voldemort is as illusory as that between white nationalism and white supremacism. When JK Rowling announces what Dumbledore would do, she’s announcing the politics of the entire work, its good and evil figures all rolled into one. This is what fandom-hermeneutics fails to understand: you can’t introject a single character sliced off from its text; you can only swallow the whole thing. When JK Rowling ventriloquises her friendly wizard to say that Palestine solidarity or socialism make the Hogwarts man feel very sad, watch her head spin round to reveal the pale leering mouth of the Dark Lord.
Harry Potter has a godawful politics, and pretty decent ethics. I mean, “don’t be Hitler kids” isn’t exactly sophisticated. As a personal ethics “it is our choices, not our abilities that make us who we are”, is pretty decent.
‘Choices’? I think you’ve just proved Sam’s point.
What?
She’s not going to like this. Yippee.
She beautiful.. ^_^
This article makes my 7th level dual bat-wielding bat warlock sad <3 <3
To claim that JK Rowling is not the author of Harry Potter is as spurious and ludicrous a claim as suggesting that Bathilda Bagshot is not the author of ‘Hogwarts: A History’. Certainly it sounds enticing and sensationalist to the Bagshot-deniers, but closer examination proves it to be embarrassingly devoid of fact. One doesn’t have to delve deep into the author’s analogies to find the inaccuracies therein.
Let’s start with this troll in chains, shall we? Aside from the immediate and flagrant disregard for the Statute of Secrecy (driving a bus in the presence of muggles?!) what are these chains made of that they are strong enough to bind the robust arms of a mountain troll? And if he is controlled by spellwork, how is it possible the magic has penetrated his coarse skin? The author seems obsessed with Joanne Rowling’s billionaire status; conveniently ignoring the fact that she has fallen off the billionaire’s list due to charitable giving. I assume that’s because it doesn’t suit the narrative of JK as a Corbyn-hating member of the elite? But I digress. There’s so much to refute in terms of basic wizarding fact, that we really don’t have time for muggle politics.
Nifflers eat salmon, do they? Witch, please. They wouldn’t be much use as treasure hunters if they were distracted by fish nor fowl. ‘Tis but gold they are after, make no mistake.
These helicopters JK mistakes for werewolves… Do they only fly around Edinburgh once a month at the full moon? What a curious schedule.
These house-elves who stitch her clothes? An interesting conundrum. The author refers to their ‘enslavement’ numerous times, but fails to acknowledge that the very thing that gives house elves freedom is the act of touching clothes. How can they be enslaved and touch clothes at the same time? The Wizengamot would throw this argument from the dungeons faster than you can say ‘Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore’. But this point peeves me much more than the poltergeist of the same name. To dismiss the experience of house-elves as ‘enslaved’ is not to respect their own description of their experience. Dumbledore paid Dobby a wage – was he a slave by definition? No. He also offered Winky one, which she refused. The house-elves of Griffyndor tower had numerous opportunities to ‘free’ themselves via Hermione’s knitted hats, but the very thought offended them. They did not view their situation as enslavement, they loved their post. The author’s insistence that they are ‘enslaved’ smacks of white heroism at its most potent. This no-maj thinks he knows what is better for house-elves than they do themselves. How patronising…
Oh and there was nothing to suggest Dumbledore was gay in the text? I suppose the fact that he spent all day in the company of Gellert Grindelwald and then sent him owls all night was no indication? He missed the company of boys his age? Gellert ‘inflamed’ him? Perhaps the author, unpracticed in the art of legilimency, is not familiar with the well-known wizarding fact that a late night owl is the magical equivalent of a booty call. Or a dick pic.
JK wished for magic to counteract Brexit, you cry. What is the incantation for the spoiling spell she wished to use on the ballots? I’m not familiar with its existence. Far more likely she wished to produce a patronus, to counteract the xenophobic rhetoric and rise in hate crimes the vote inspired.
But wait, I’m confused. Is Dumbledore the same as Voldemort or is he ‘an adored avatar of infallible good’? You call him both. He *wishes* he was infallible. The dubious circumstances surrounding the death of Arianna may suggest not. Or indeed the lengthy scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in which he repeatedly admits to an old man’s mistakes…
Gryffindors are yellow-haired fascists? Which ones? The half-blood Harry Potter? The dreadlocked Angelina Johnson? The mudblood Granger? I of course use that racial slur ironically. But don’t let fact get in the way of your witch hunt… Especially when there are actual witches to hunt.
You say Harry Potter isn’t really about dragons and broomsticks? Oh really?! IS IT NOT?! Of course it isn’t. Dragons barely feature and broomsticks are but a method of travel. That’s like saying 1984 isn’t really about spectacles and ships, two things mentioned in the book. A fact we, barring the ill informed author, are already MORE than familiar with.
Oh, Hogwarts is a magical Eton? Is Eton, like Hogwarts, free to attend? I’m not familiar with the former but I know enough to know that the Weasleys would struggle to put the hair on any of their ginger children through the school, never mind seven full-bodied offspring.
‘To read Harry Potter uncritically is to adopt the posture of a Hufflepuff’… And to write that sentence is to perpetrate the ignorant, lazy stereotype that Hufflepuffs are of less than average intelligence. Profiling much? Cedric Diggory, co-champion of the most prestigious prize in school wizardry would shake his handsome head in disgust.
What a strange claim you make in saying that seemingly every adult is employed by the ministry of magic. Who are the esteemed teachers of Hogwarts then? Children? I suppose the Hogs Head is also run by a child? The Three Broomsticks? The Leaky Cauldron? Someone should really look into underage drinking in Hogsmeade.
But it is perhaps the author’s last sentence that is so very telling. And so worrying. Everyone opposed to the ideology of Voldemort refers to him as Voldemort. Or Voldy. Or the more cautious ‘He who must not be named’. Or even his given name, Tom Riddle. It is only Voldemort’s supporters, ‘crude fascists’ the author calls them, that refer to him as ‘The Dark Lord. Well it seems the hour is up on the author’s polyjuice potion and his true muggle-hating JK-baiting identity has been revealed. When he speaks of ‘The Dark Lord’ in his last sentence, he tells us he is none other than a Death Eater. And as he doesn’t mention the dark mark upon his skin, we can assume he is a lowly, unbranded one at that.
shut up nerd
This is definitely Hufflepuff talk
“Far more likely she wished to produce a patronus, to counteract the xenophobic rhetoric and rise in hate crimes the vote inspired”
Not how a Patronus works unless she thought Brexit voters are Dementors – and if that was the case then Sam’s argument that Rowling is a deranged lunatic who thinks her books are real is essentially proven. Not really doing her any favors.
You buried half your post in pedantic “thats not how magic works in harry potter so you’re wrong” shit that nobody cares about, the least you could do is try to be CORRECT about it.
For real. Also it’s not “touching clothes” that frees elves from servitude, they have to be given clothes. Also, the “they want to be enslaved!” argument is fucking foul.
Are you like 15?
WAIT ARE YOU JK ROWLING? i think it’s her
Your refuting a political critique of a text by critiquing his understanding of the fictional universe. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
Are you debating this as if Harry Potter were true, because wtf
omg thank you, this was the best laugh I’ve had tonight–made my day
Joanne is that you
Brona CT, I’m fond of the Harry Potter world too. But Sam’s article makes good points, and makes them well. I don’t think JKRowling would dislike his article if she read it.
Perhaps Hermione did use her position at the Ministry to propose a form of muggle inclusion scheme, and we just haven’t heard about it yet.
this is possibly the most autistic thing I have ever read
The idea of Ravenclaws fulfilling the function of Jews doesn’t make a lot of sense imo. I mean you’re right about Hogwarts basically representing the fascist idea of a harmonious order where everyone has their place and accepts it gladly (and the magic of the Sorting Hat basically makes this ordering a metaphysical property of the universe) but the Ravenclaws are clearly included within the order and basically represent the intellectuals. If there’s a figure of the Jew in Harry Potter it’s Voldemort himself: sneaky, conspiratorial, embracing rootlessness, clearly queer coded (the limp wrist, the femme-snake sashay, using magic as a technology for the transformation of the body beyond its natural form and limits), and very clearly disruptive and threatening to an order that would otherwise be without antagonism (because class doesn’t exist in Rowling’s fantasy). But obviously because it’s her own stupid little morality play she can make him also be the Unequivocally Evil Fascist.
In the Harry Potter universe, there are only three characters: Ron, Hermione and Harry. Everything else you see therein is in fact the product of one or another of their respective imaginations.
Harry, who killed his mum as a baby and was abandoned by his dad, imagines all the heroism contained within the books as part of a desperate psychological need to atone for his infant evil. Ron, who is a mutant aberration from another world, dreams up a big, bustling family of fellow mutants – represented by their ginger hair – and is responsible for all the moments of domesticity and camaraderie shared between the characters. Hermione, who has profound mental retardation, imagines herself clever and is responsible for all the intellectual fluff that fills up the fat wads of paper your greasy fingers have ploughed through so often over the years.
Face it, folks: There are only killers, loners and losers. Everyone else is imaginary.
What the fuck did I just read? Thats some bullshit you pulled out of your ass.
both things can be true, though, because Fascists normally project a lot of qualities onto the Other that really belong to fascists, such as sneakiness, backstabbing, conspiratoriality, etc… Voldemort can be both a jew and a fascist.
also wrt to his sexuality, I do see him coded as queer. I think in some ways he’s the most interresting character. he’s basically made to seem like a post-sexual/asexual horror
That’s a pretty good article, man.
[…] lately, relying on her beloved Harry Potter and friends to prove her own point. Sam Kriss took her at her word, and proved perhaps a different point than the one she […]
I like to imagine that ‘Harry Potter’ always existed and JK just happened to be the person who wrote it down, it means I don’t have to care about all her extra-curricular writing and opinion :) death of the author indeed…
Oh my god who let these people onto your comments.
Mapping reality onto a just-so fiction as a narrative & analytical tactic, you say? So J. K. is an economist?
[…] The Harry Potter books are bad books and and have a bad, childish, reactionary view of the world. So does J. K. Rowling. […]
I like the point you make about JK being a “fan, not an author”. I would have never thought to tie the Harry Potter stories to political ideas, but you did a great job explaining the correlation.
[…] I think I already said (?) that I came to Harry Potter really really late. Like: I only read them last year (hangs head in shame): but still: I did really really like it. I mean: if I had to choose which of all the books I’ve ever read would be best as a worldwide phenomena like: which book it would be best for kids to read and “get them into reading” and all the rest well then yeah – I would choose Harry Potter because – oh my goodness – it does have a whole bunch of really nice good cool life lessons and a solid chunk of morality running through it’s core which actually gets more heavy as the books go on (Order of the Phoenix being my own personal fave if that wasn’t already obvious: don’t trust authority kids!): so you know – I’m am a Harry Potter fan (even if I’m not always a J K Rowling one). […]
Gryffindors are the middle class white guys who interrupt you to tell you about racism in a seminar and text you ‘hey :)’ repeatedly after getting no response and they wear their caps backwards and have a cheese knife at home
Brilliant. At last someone says what I feel about this silly woman and her manipulative behaviour towards her own fans
I have some small disagreements tho. Sam kriss reads Harry Potter as an inherently reactionary fable of a petit-bourgeois boy who faces some small trials and eventually becomes one of the aristocracy
However I think that there’s a lot of implicit critique of liberalism and neoliberalism in especially the last half of this series, even if Rowling is too thick to see it
For example, I think that the fifth book has a lot of heavy critiques of neoliberalism/capitalist realism/Market Stalinism in education. Umbridge is a teacher appointed by the Ministry (ok, sure, not private sector, but Market stalinism and actual gov’t bureaucracy become **almost** identical under late capitalism ) who has arbitrary quantitative standards that she evaluates teachers with, that really amount for thin excuses to fire people that deviate from the norm. (similar to how under market stalinism you’re allowed and even *encouraged* to deviate from the norm, but can be punished via market mechanisms for actually deviating from the norm)
In addition, Fudge is clearly a bumbling neoliberal or neocon leaning centrist, and it shows how people like that actually aid and harbor fascists
The ministry (which is portrayed as neoliberal state) consistently supports fascists either by denying they are a threat or via actual financial connections.
A lot of people have commented on the most obvious political allegory in harry potter–the death eaters and voldemort as nazis… but the more sophisticated stuff is how the story consistently shows liberal pacifists and bureaucrats getting in the way of the actual fight against fascism/death eaters etc
It’s clear that umbridge’s teaching is based on test prep rather than prepping students for any kind of actual praxis.
the resistance in harry potter is not non-violent. they are uneasy about committing the level of atrocities of the actual fascists (who wouldn’t be) but they will still aim to kill, be violent, nasty etc…
even torture
there’s almost no way that it can easily be read as *consistently* liberal
just because she talks about the power of love and harry never performs a killing curse.
sure it’s christian
but i’d say it’s more leftist than liberal, more radical christian than anything else
I think that the story is good and has deeper political allegories, but that rowling consistently gives into her worse impulses to create an idyllic fantasy of upper class british boyhood/childhood or whatever. **but those impulses fight** throughout the series. the series isn’t *just* about that class fantasy. IT’s about more than that. What is true and unfortunate, is that in the epilogue Rowling gives into the worst impulses and creates a kind of fluffball fantasy of the idyllic middle class life that they were all apparently fighting for. There’s a radical story to be unearthed in Harry Potter, but it needs to be saved from J.K. Rowling
cmon sam prove me wrong. harry potter is a socdem fantasy with fascist elements but it is not liberal or only insipidly reactionary