This essay originally appeared on the Hogwarts Professor blog on May 26, 2017. It has been lightly edited and updated.
“Professor Strand, which is your favorite Harry Potter movie?” a student asked recently as class began.
“I’m sorry,” I replied, “did you ask, ‘which is my favorite Harry Potter BOOK?’”
“Oh, yeah, right. Which book,” she said, unfazed. A few students murmured their understanding of her error, but most simply waited to see how much class time the question would chew up (a favorite pastime of my students: baiting instructor into digressive pop culture conversation).
I wasn’t altogether surprised by her phrasing, as I had encountered the same movies-as-primary attitude in a college-aged Potter fan just a few weeks before, as I attended a collegiate Muggle Quidditch tournament. Seeking an understanding of the viability of Quidditch on its own terms, I had asked one of the players if everyone on her Quidditch team was a Harry Potter fan, or if some players simply played for love of the sport. She informed me most were indeed big Potter fans, but there were one or two players who, she said, despairing of their poor taste, “haven’t seen any of the movies!” (Their attention to the books: not mentioned.)
Then two weekends ago, as I gave my lecture about the symbolic meaning of Quidditch at the Roanoke Harry Potter festival, two different (young adult) audience members challenged me on my assertion that James Potter was a Quidditch Chaser. “James was a Seeker,” they politely insisted. I tried to explain that on the level of symbols – which is the level on which Quidditch operates best – James has to be a Chaser, because that position corresponds to his role in the larger narrative. James is a member of the Order of the Phoenix and a goal-scorer in the fight against Voldemort, but not a Horcrux hunter (like Harry and RAB, both of whom were Seekers, on the pitch and off). Thanks to Google and the proliferation of smart phones, we discovered the source of confusion: in a 2000 Scholastic interview with J.K. Rowling, the author stated definitively that James played Chaser for the Gryffindor Quidditch team, although in the book she has McGonagall identify him only as “an excellent Quidditch player.” (SS 152) However, the 2001 Warner Brothers film adaptation of Sorcerer’s Stone misidentifies him as a Seeker, disregarding the nuances of a complex narrative symbol system. (And not for the last time.)
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