Hey guys.
JK Rowling here to make a little clarification on something that’s of monumental importance
to the world of Harry Potter.
Yes, Quidditch players CAN get CTE.
In fact, there are lots of squibs out there who weren’t born non-magical, but lost their
abilities after repeated blows to the head by bludgers.
And why hasn’t Hermione raised the alarm about this, along with house elf liberation?
Well she’s getting kickbacks from the Quidditch association who want to make sure those fat
advertising checks from Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans keep on coming.
But can’t magic cure CTE, you might ask?
After all, it fixed Harry’s broken skull.
Well it could, but Madame Pomfrey is in bed with big potion, who want you hooked on their
brain-be-good elixir.
Alright you may have figured out by now that A) I’m not actually JK Rowling and B)
This video is in regards to her various tweaks to Harry Potter canon.
What started as a clarification on Dumbledore’s personal life mere months after the series
concluded, slowly evolved into an avalanche of unnecessary canon additions to the Harry
Potter universe.
That avalanche recently gave us the qualification on the specific intensity of Dumbledore’s
romantic life, but nothing will ever top the revelation that wizards, historically speaking,
used to poo themselves.
So we had to ask: Why?
Why is this happening?
For fans, craving more details about fictional worlds we’re invested in is simple, and
incredibly relatable.
We love these worlds and we want to know more.
We start with a question like “Where did Snoke come from? or “was Cobb still dreaming?”
Then we move on to big questions like: is Toad’s mushroom a hat, or part of his head?
Those questions beget more questions, until we find ourselves asking the “real” questions,
like: if wizards rejected muggle technology why are there toilets in Hogwarts?
And that’s why we’re here today.
Of course, JK Rowling isn’t the only huckster of canon.
As Mike Rugnetta notes in his incredible essay “Canon is an Abyss” these occurrences
are everywhere.
Nintendo has confirmed that toad’s head is not a hat and designer from Dungeons and
Dragons has canonically declared that gnome butts smell like honeysuckle and bromine.
More recently, Kevin Feige has canonically clarified why Nick Fury didn’t call Captain
Marvel during several near-extinction scenarios.
While Rugnetta has argued that Canon is a bottomless abyss of which there is no end,
and he’s not wrong, I think there’s another way to understand our canonical obsession,
and it’s not JUST about how we interact with the fictional worlds we love, but how
we interact with our own world.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Canon.
And spoilers ahead for Harry Potter.
And now, back to the show.
In terms of canon, we are living in a very specific historical moment.
First of all, Shakespeare didn’t have Twitter.
But more importantly, he wasn’t living in an era of “engagement.”
Brands don’t just make extra canonical content due to our voracious demand, they often do
it in the name of one of the most important marketing metrics: “engagement.”
Engagement is, in the world of brand building, simply any level of interactivity with a brand
beyond spectatorship.
That means likes, shares, forum posts, fan theories, it’s all engagement.
Today, the number of eyeballs on your brand isn’t enough.
Social media marketers and Youtubers know the real way to spread brand recall is to
have consumers interact with your brand.
Hence, the birth of alternate reality games to promote shows, clever subway ads that make
you do puzzles, or the rise of “comments” and “view time” as meaningful measurements
of success.
In the world of content production, canon is engagement, and engagement is money.
JK Rowling may not be explicitly out to make a buck by manufacturing more and more canon,
but the study of canon, the discussion of canon, and the consuming of canon all create
meaningful engagement for the Harry Potter brand.
Whether it’s a Gryffindor scarf, a custom lightsaber, or a collectible pickle rick,
engagement moves inventory.
And this logic has taken over everything.
This kind of canon production may have existed in games like Warhammer or Dungeons and Dragons
back in the day, but it's slowly overtaking the mainstream.
Today’s games like Overwatch or Apex Legends, have whole character biographies and additional
“canon” to consume along with them.
These games are, by their very format plotless, but plotless games don’t make for good,
meaningful emotional engagement.
And meaningful emotional engagement means beaucoup bucks.
But I don’t want to pin this on mean companies emotionally exploiting our need be absorbed
into a highly-monetized fantasy world.
After all, JK Rowling has more than enough money.
But if we go back to even before stock markets, we can see how canonical meddling was less
about making money and more about anxiety over one’s place in the world.
Like Rowling, authors have long been clarifying their works.
Even Cicero, as Classics Professor Caroline Bishop notes meticulously commented on his
old texts and speeches, clarifying how his original works should really be read.
This meddling inspired others, Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, to give the reader a helping
hand in interpreting their own words.
Bishops notes that JK Rowling finds herself in the company of Nabokov, who wrote his own
endnotes for Ada under a pseudonym, and TS Eliot, who provided his own notes to his famous
work The Waste Land.
In many cases, clarifying canon spoke to an authorial anxiety.
Cicero, Bishop writes, wanted to cement his legacy and, because he was a politician, win
more votes.
There were few things more important than legacy to these giants of intellect, and continually
revising their work was their way of trying to ensure their image lived on.
Unlike Rowling- TS Eliot, Nabokov, Cicero or Vergil didn’t have twitter, and thus
didn’t have hoards of fans asking just how intense was Humbert Humbert’s romantic life
was, thank god!
Now, on one hand, I REALLY don’t want to know.
But, on the other, the ease of which canon can be tweaked now with a tweet or a television
appearance means authors are even more prone to impulsivity.
And as we’ll argue, the resulting “abyss” of canon isn’t just annoying.
It can make our lives deeply nihilistic.
To find out just what the hell we’re talking about, we’re going to get real metaphysical
with 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger’s primary focus was our existence in the world.
He argued that since the Ancient Greeks, philosophers and literally everyone else deeply misunderstood
the question of “being”, so much so that he had to invent a bunch of words just to
explain it.
Now, this all gets really jargony and hard to follow, but most simply, he is less interested
in “being” than what he calls "Dasein", which translates to “Being there.”
In other words, humans don’t exist as some isolated entity apart from everything else,
we exist in a world.
So to understand our existence, we have to understand our relationship to the environment
around us.
As such instead of simply “being,” his writing is full of “being-with” “being-in”
and “being-towards.”
Which brings us to being-in-the-world, the idea that our existence is fully immersed
in the reality around us.
For Heidegger, we are thrown into the world, and this thrownness, which is his term, is
a key component of our being.
As philosopher Simon Critchley summarizes “Thrownness is the simple awareness that
we always find ourselves somewhere, namely delivered over to a world with which we are
fascinated, a world we share with others.”
There is something about the fictional worlds we get lost in that speaks to this basic question
of being.
When we read Harry Potter, we lose ourselves in the narrative of a boy destined to be a
great wizard.
And we are, metaphorically speaking, thrown into this fictional universe, and, along with
other fans, are enthralled and curious about the laws of magic, the history of Hogwarts,
and so on.
For Heidegger, being-in-the-world is about the world disclosing itself to us.
In a book like Harry Potter, the author discloses, much more literally, a world and its logic,
rules, mysteries, emotions, and so on.
This disclosure happens in dialogue, say when Hagrid explains to Harry that he’s a wizard,
"You're a wizard harry", when we flashback to the truth about Snape, or just the simple
descriptions of sentient paintings and nearly-headless ghosts.
We can say the same of Star Wars, or John Wick, or any imaginary world.
I am your father, as uttered by Darth Vader, discloses a whole new side to the fictional
universe of Star Wars.
So, narratives disclose their worlds to us not unlike how the world discloses itself
to us, cool.
But does that mean there’s no difference between learning that Snape was always on
Team Harry, and the notion that Wizards used to poo themselves?
Are they both just satiating a curiosity that is fundamental to our existence?
Well again, I’m going to argue no.
In fact, the canon updating via tweets might even make us all nihilists.
The problem, for Heidegger, is when our understanding of things becomes “instrumental.”
For instance, if I’m looking to make a table, a tree starts looking like nothing but a nice
future 2x4.
That understanding can conceal the other facets of its existence like, its importance in the
ecosystem of a forest, its history starting from a seed, or even just appreciating it
for its beauty.
Heidegger labels this kind of thinking “technological,” that the vast array of ways we relate to the
world is reduced to the practical, that a tree exists solely to make wood, a horse exists
solely to ride, or that fellow humans exist solely as “networking opportunities.”
In the Potterverse, the problem isn’t necessarily that we’re intrigued by taxonomies of magical
creatures, but that we want to reduce a mesmerizing fantasy into a rational, clearly ordered world.
What we gain in knowing the history of plumbing in Hogwarts we lose in our original relationship
to the text, our sense of wonderment, inspiration, etc.
For Heidegger, this “technological rationality,” always conceals as it reveals.
In the real world, this leaves us “Homeless” as Heidegger says.
But, what does he mean by this?
Well that this narrative we’ve spun of us looking down upon our ordered world has made
us forget our original relationship of being immersed in that world, and it starts to feel
alien to us, and that’s the kind of nihilism Heidegger is talking about.
The world loses meaning.
As Critchley writes, “Heidegger insists that we have to thrust aside our interpretative
tendencies which cover over our everyday experience of the world and attend much more closely
to that which shows itself.”
So, while we’re busy reading JK’s updates about the history of Hogwarts plumbing, we
conceal other aspects of the book, like all the feels of Dobby dying a free elf.
That, and every revelation usually begets more questions, and, as a result, there is
no end to what Rowling or others must reveal.
The revelation that wizards pooped themselves until somewhat recently, was begat by a screed
in which JK Rowling felt compelled to explain why there were bathrooms in Hogwarts.
Wizards, we’ve been told, don’t use muggle technology, so why do they have plumbing?
And at that point, instead of letting this fictional world be, she decided to answer
that plumbing was introduced in the 18th century.
So did wizards relieve themselves in magical bowls or bed pans before then?
No.
They just let it out, wherever they were, before magically disposing of it.
From here, as I’m sure Heidegger would have warned if he was caught up on Harry Potter
lore, we might ask: who installed the plumbing?
Why is there mention of bedpans in Prisoner of Azkaban.
Does this imply that wizards can be too ill to magically un-soil themselves?
Has Madame Pomphry forgotten the lost art of depoo-ment?
Is this the kind of magic that lies hidden in the restricted section of the library?
Did muggle-born wizards back in the day, who were acquainted with an outhouse, ever become
homesick for their ancestral way of doing their business?
The point is that, in our obsession with canon, we can often lose sight of what makes a piece
of fiction amazing in the first place.
Mark Twain recounted, in a very coincidentally Heideggerian way, about a similar experience
with his childhood love of the Mississippi River.
As he became an experienced river boat pilot, the river lost its mystery and magnificence.
He wrote in “Life on the Mississippi”, “Now when I had mastered the language of
this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly
as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition.
But I had lost something, too.
I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived.
All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”
For Heidegger, there lies a solution to this called “releasement.”
That is, allowing the world to disclose itself, in all of its facets, to us.
For Mark Twain, that is the poetry and grace of the Mississippi, before he learned to masterfully
navigate its treacherous waters.
And maybe that’s what “letting Harry Potter be” means - not learning to navigate the
nooks and crannies of canon to figure out how Draco eats his steak, but to just appreciate
it.
Now importantly, that’s not to say you can’t engage deeper.
You could read, re-read, and constantly discover new facets and meanings that the text discloses,
but that doesn’t mean you should necessarily reread all 7 books to simply build evidence
for your theory that Harry owes back taxes for his inheritance.
And that’s why, for example, my favorite show of all time is Twin Peaks, but I refuse
to make a Wisecrack video about it.
Trying to make logical sense about a show that is so largely about tone, atmosphere,
and visual artistry will only ruin those elements that have captivated me like no other show.
So, what do you guys think?
Should we embrace the scatology of Hogwarts in all of its glory, or just let pooping wizards
lie.
Let us know what you think in the comments, and as always, thanks for watching, guys. Peace.