Once upon a time, I’d walk into walls and trees to avoid putting down a Harry Potter book. But I can’t find it in myself to read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Here is a confession: until I saw an item on the news, I forgot that Sunday was Cursed Child’s release day. While other fans went to midnight release parties and made their own Butterbeer, I just…forgot.
I paid through the teeth for a copy from the airport on Sunday night. But when I got to my seat on the plane, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the book out of my bag.
That was days ago, and Cursed Child remains untouched. I haven’t even lifted the cover to look inside. When I got home, I dutifully added it to my ‘to read’ pile and then did my best to ignore it. Every time I walk past that stack of books my eyes are drawn to it, and I’m struck with a tremendous feeling of guilt. Like I’m a bad fan. Like I’m not a real fan, not anymore. And then I walk on by. I don’t pick it up.
The First Story
I discovered the Harry Potter books at age seven, a few months before the release of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Or I should say, my mother discovered them, thought they might entice my brother into reading and bought the first two home. I stole them, never giving them back. The rest is family history.
My love affair with Potter was immediate and intense. For the most part, this involved reading and rereading. Always a fast reader, at a conservative estimate I must have read the first four books at least 50 times each, and only a few less for the later installments. Being a Potter fan in Australia meant no wizard rock, no midnight release parties, and no fan conventions. I didn’t feel I was missing out without these physical manifestations of fandom. My love was personal and, over the years, increasingly inward looking. At its core, this was a devotion that was almost ritualistic. Everything was tied to the text and the act of reading. All I needed was the books.
The worldwide embargo on new Potter books lifted in Australia at 9 a.m.. I’d pick up my book from a smiling bookseller in a pointed hat, and leave with my nose buried in it. I walked into trees, and walls, and doors. It was a laughably inefficient method of reading. Distracted by my collision course, I had to read every sentence at least twice to actually process what it said. It would have been much faster — more practical — to run home and then start reading. Yet I couldn’t find it in me to exert even this tiny degree of self-control. I had a new Harry Potter book in my hand, and I had to know what it contained immediately.
In 2007, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released. Five hours after getting the book in my hands, I emerged dazed and in tears. I was finished. As far as I knew, so was Harry Potter. I was sixteen years old and a small piece of my world had ended.
The Eighth Story
On Sunday, the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child script book was released. I have been equal parts excited, ambivalent, and frustrated about the eighth story since it was announced. At first I couldn’t wait for more Potter. I was ecstatic over Hermione’s casting, but I hated how the play makes what was once accessible to everyone suddenly elitist and exclusive. I don’t agree that releasing the script makes up for this; the story was designed to be watched, not read, a fact highlighted by reviews that have consistently praised the way staging and special effects were used to elevate an otherwise underwhelming story.
When it comes to the play itself, I share the frustrations of many Hypable writers: over the failure to finally include an LGBT relationship; over the use of devices that don’t make sense within Rowling’s world; over the reliance on self-referential material from and nostalgia for the original series to prop up the plot.
It could be that I’d be more motivated to read Cursed Child if I agreed with the creative choices contained within. I already know what happens in the play in a general sense; I asked one of the Hypable writers to send me the synopsis after seeing the play in previews, but I can’t recall all of the many twists and turns. But of what I remember, and the quotes I have seen online, it is unrecognizable. In tone and in behavior, these are not my beloved characters and this is not my beloved wizarding world. But given that J.K. Rowling didn’t write it, how could I expect that it would feel the same?
Yet with all of my hesitation, I fully intended to buy the script book and read it upon release. It wasn’t until I was actually faced with this option that I felt myself resisting. When the book was in my hand, I couldn’t do it.
There are lots of Potter fans who have elected to ignore Cursed Child. They’re sticking to the original seven, and many have refused to buy the script at all. I envy such decisiveness.
For me, Cursed Child cannot be so easily contained. Rather I feel the fatigue it inspires seeping into the special place Potter has in my heart. I sense it contaminating my feelings toward this series that I very literally — despite a clear memory of encountering it for the first time — can’t remember being without.
In the reaches of my memory there is no pre-Potter; there’s just my life. It’s a terrifying thought that a play I haven’t seen and a script I haven’t read could somehow ruin that for me.
Differences Between Text and “Text”
It is a problem limited and linked by medium. The more canon J.K. Rowling releases, the more I selfishly want to beg her to please just stop. But although I’m less than enthusiastic about new stories released on Pottermore, and certain aspects of the Fantastic Beasts films, I find it easier to ignore additions that don’t arrive wrapped in the authority of a hard cover with the words “Harry Potter” on the spine. (This is fortuitous, as there looks to be no end to the Potter expansion in sight.)
Mine is of course a completely irrational position. If anything, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them could be considered more canon than Cursed Child; J.K. Rowling did actually write that one. But if Fantastic Beasts introduces elements I dislike, I don’t think it will be difficult for me to lump it in with all of the other disappointing Potter films I’ve watched over the years. Without delving too deeply into the role of new media in changing the authority of different mediums, things published on the internet simply don’t carry the same weight for me as, say, Beedle the Bard did, or an encyclopedia would.
For me, there is all the difference in the world between a story presented as physical text on a physical page, and one conveyed in a different medium. It’s text, vs. “text”. The ritual of reading the book matters. When something is offered up in a different form, I have completely different — more lenient — expectations.
If I had seen the play I don’t think I would find myself in this hailstorm of emotions. By experiencing it in person, it would be easier to consider Cursed Child an event, one to be enjoyed and then dismissed, as soon as that moment passed.
Now for myself and millions of Potter fans, Cursed Child exists in an in-between space. It was designed for the stage, but here it is in a book. It’s the same story, yet how can it convey the same meaning, when stripped of everything that made the stage the right place to tell the story in the first place. J. K. Rowling assured us, “when audiences see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child they will understand why we chose to tell this story in this way,” — but what about all those who can’t see it?
What, then, is the answer? I can’t imagine I’m alone in navigating this new Harry Potter experience, and attempting to reconcile the manic reading of my childhood with my current reluctance. How do you change so suddenly from the seven-year-old book thief to the sixteen-year-old crying over Molly Weasley’s defiance to the twenty-five-year-old who can’t even open the damn book?
Here is my illogical rationale. By not reading the book I’m somehow mitigating its very existence. The act of restricting Cursed Child to the physical space the book takes up is the best way I can find to restrict the emotional space it takes up in my mind and heart. If I read the book, the floodgates will open.
Once I know what J.K. Rowling thinks an adult Harry, Ron, and Hermione look and sound like, I can never un-know it. Whether I like it or not, that knowledge will change the way I read the first seven books in the series. And it will change it despite the fact that whatever I take from reading the script is not necessarily the intended meaning, as would be conveyed through all of mechanisms of the stage that a book simply can’t mimic, no matter how great the stage directions are.
For now Cursed Child is like Schrödinger’s story; both there, and not.
For now, I won’t be reading it. I might even move it out of my ‘to read’ pile. After all, I don’t have to read it, but I also don’t have to punish myself with its presence. Maybe those fans who refuse to acknowledge it have it right, and the key is to simply try and ignore it until, much like my experience on the publication date, you just…forget.
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