Book 1 Chapter 6: The Journey from Platform Nine and Three Quarters
In this chapter, Harry leaves for Hogwarts and finds Platform Nine and Three Quarters with the help of the Weasley family. He immediately becomes friends with Ron, and on the train ride, they meet Hermione and nearly have a fight with Draco. Finally, they arrive at Hogwarts, where Hagrid leads the first year students on a boat ride to the castle.
The book doesn’t exactly say this, but I imagine Harry must be feeling overwhelmed. He’s going from a month-long silent treatment from the Dursleys to a crowd of people who treat him as a celebrity. It’s a relief when he sits down with Ron, and the two of them immediately start talking about their feelings. Ron shares the stress of having to live up to five older brothers’ legacy, and Harry shares his worries about being totally new to the wizarding world. It’s a very sweet friendship that quickly develops.
Hermione is introduced with every thought in her head tumbling out of her mouth. As a kid, I remember having second-hand embarrassment about her. She’s so not cool and I wanted her to shut up already! I probably over-identified with her, being uncool and bookish myself. Now, I think she’s adorable.
At the same time, I’m thinking of last week’s post, the idea that “pleasure and offense can come from the same place” as Marlon James said.1 I still think it’s hard to square the two feelings. Rowling’s actions continue to baffle, frustrate, and depress me, but meeting Ron and Hermione still feels warm and cozy.
I’m thinking also of a quote from the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, in which co-host Casper ter Kuile said:
One of the things that feels helpful, as you draw that analogy with a traditional sacred text, is to think about what it is that the text or the story of Harry Potter is getting us to…this is what happens when a text like The Bible is weaponized; it feels like what The Bible was helping people get to, that deep, true, ultimate bit in you is also taken away. I hope that all of us can make a distinction between the woman who had amazing, visionary, creative capacity to write this story, and the deepest part of us, the truest part of us that maybe that story helped us be in touch with. That part of us, it never belonged to J.K. Rowling…I hope that, whether we continue to engage with the text or not, we know that nothing can ever separate us from that deepest part of who we are and that deepest love that connects us all. She could never even get close to it.2
This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while now, but I’m not totally sure how to articulate it. There is something about art—whether it’s a book or a movie or a painting or anything else—that does help us connect to something. This quote from Casper is about connecting to the deeper parts of the self, but I think there’s more to it than that. When a work of art really touches me, it sometimes feels like I’m connecting with myself, but I may also feel like I’m connecting with other people, with history, with something too nebulous to put words to.
Right now, I don’t feel like Harry Potter touches me in quite that way. I can say that I do feel connected to my younger self, the highly anxious kid who really could have benefited from being as outspoken as Hermione. And I agree with Casper ter Kuile that J.K. Rowling has nothing whatsoever to do with that.
For today, I want to close with a recommendation to watch YouTuber Jessie Gender’s video “How Transphobes Wield Nazi Crime Denialism To Further Fascism,” which discusses Rowling’s Holocaust denial (or Holocaust revisionism; the video also gets into some of the complicated terminology there). She goes into detail on the history of gay and transgender people in Weimar Germany and under the Nazi regime, the differences in the treatment of Jewish trans people and trans people who were seen as “Aryan,” and the conflation of transgender people and gay men in history.
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From the Podcast Hot and Bothered, Episode Take The Maniac With You to England (Chapter 27 - Part 1). October 15, 2021. Transcript: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a329f0790bcce7599907274/t/63be1586a1e9d22a5dc51df9/1673401734196/On+Eyre+Ch+27+Part+1.docx.pdf
From the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, episode Owl Post Edition: J.K. Rowling and Transphobia with Jackson Bird, July 16, 2020. Transcript: https://notsorry.cdn.prismic.io/notsorry/d00529d8-9bed-4ae5-8ac2-ead54569e58c_HPST+transcript+7.jackson.pdf