Of Wands and Worlds: Recent Scuttle on Harry Potter and the Elder Wand

This is mainly a response on some things that have been coming out recently I guess in  J. K. Rowling's tweet about the elder wand as sentient. From what I can tell, the speculation is all surrounding whether the wand that Newt takes from Grindlewald in Fantastic Beasts 1 is the elder wand and who then actually owns it. Some have a theory that Jacob Kowalksi will become made the "owner" as a way to hide it, which would be an awesome neat little redemption of Peter Petigrew as a trop: short, rotund, and made the keep of a secret/power, but Jacob is virtuous and in love with magic simply for its beauty and will do honorably with what has been entrusted to him, whereas Peter was always trying to suck up to the most powerful bully in the room for saving his own skin and betrayed what was given him. And we know the wand has to be an issue based in the material in Deathly Hallows, and I an guessing she might do some things with it in the coming Fantastic Beasts movies that really impress me (same as I was really impressed with the potential for fluidity and wand-as-language interpretations in the material in Deathly Hallows on the "mutual quest for knowledge and experience ... the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand").

But now to the real content of this post. The tweet in question runs: "The secret of the elder wand is that it's more sentient than any other. It can identify the caster of any spell that touches it and keeps tally of which wizard has beaten which, giving its allegiance to the one it judges the victor. Physical possession is irrelevant."

I'll get it out of the way ... *yawn*.

I have to state out front that that yawn is playful and not meant to diss anybody. I honestly mean no ill will or derision on any of it. But I also really do have no real vested interest, and if she writes good stories for the remaining four movies of the Fantastic Beasts series, I'll like them and say I like them and analyze them for what I like in them. And if it seems like the remainder of them get all wrapped up in obsessive physics-of-magic mongering to the detriment of a good story, I'll probably say I think that and then move on. But, for the record, both this tweet and the sort of frenzy surrounding its content seem to me to be best described with a term very fitting for the original medium ... twitterpated. It's all aflutter, but I don't think about anything really substantial to interpreting the canonical Harry Potter story of the seven books.

Maybe it has value in conjecturing what she will do in the future, and as I said, if I think what she does in the future is a good human story and think it's interesting how she constructs that using, among other things, a physics-of-magic she's created in the world, then I'll write that. But as far as determining meaning in the closed canon of the seven-book HP series, I simply think it's a lot of needless twitterpation, probably in response to a lot of, well, to be honest, crankiness from a materialist perspective. As I have said on this blog and back in the Muggle Matters blog days, I have found some really valuable stuff in the work of Red Hen (Joyce Odelle). But I do also think she has been focused on the physics to a level of making it the defining thing of Harry Potter, and I think that that is a mistake in how to think about literature.

(By "crankiness," I mean that, in what I have read of Red Hen's material, particularly in John Granger's Who Killed Albus Dumbledore collection from 2006, she can be somewhat acerbic in making complaints against JKR of being inconsistent and so on ... and I hope that "cranky pants" is not too harsh of a characterization ... it really comes simply from always looking for a way to work the term into any and all conversations because the place where I heard it at the end of this video makes me laugh every time I hear it, just the way the girl says it ... I say it to myself at least several times a day about myself when I'm getting frustrated with something I am editing; "somebody's got his cranky pants on").

And I think that Rowling is a bit under the sway of it a bit (just as I think she is a bit under the sway of those who talk about writing "adult" fiction when she turns out what I thought to be very thin characters in Cuckoo's Calling, to the extant that I've had no motivation to read any of the books following it) and that it is leading her to do retrojection, toying with the world needlessly to try to get something "right." I think it's needless as far as the workings of the original story. I think the original story is fine as stands. There are explanations for all the material details within the already-published canon itself, explanations that are both adequate and internally consistent.

So, here is where I will give my basic explanation of what I think the question is that all these theories are twitterpated to answer and how I think it is already answered within the scope of the original closed-canon story. The question is: So, the elder wand just knows that Harry beat Draco, maybe through some, what, magic version of the cloud and big data mining?  Or the edler wand just knows who Harry is and the whole story of Harry and Voldy and is some sort of force of justice in the world that decides Harry should win over Voldy? The wand is sort of an NSA of the magical world, successfully tapping the deep-sea cables? ... And so, we get language from the author about the elder wand being "sentient" (and I am really hoping that this sort of thing doesn't lead to obsessive reworking of the remaining four movies that drags energy away from writing actually good stories, and that it doesn't shift from being good human literature to being the Wizarding World version of Dan Brown).

So, here is my answer to that riddle. The wand does not even really need to know who is on the other end of the hawthorn wand. I think that we can take the spells cast by the wands to be sort of an extension of the wands themselves in their power, and thus can take the meeting of the spells in the air to be a meeting of the wands themselves, just as we had in the graveyard duel in Goblet of Fire. In order for the elder wand to acquiesce to the hawthorn wand, it needs to know only a few facts, and none of them are who Harry is or who Voldy is or who Draco is etc.:

1. The hawthorn wand beat the elder wand when it's rightful master, which was Draco at the time, used it to disarm the rightful owner of the elder wand itself, which was on top of the tower in Halfblood Prince. If we take "sentient" in the way of this fact being "readable" by the elder wand in such a way that it can be held in "memory" and be decisive in further interactions, I don't really have a problem with it.

2. When the wand meets another in this way (the spells meeting in midair), the elder wans can sense that this spell is being cast by the wand in "affinity," or "union," or "cooperation," or "obedience," or choose what term you like, with one who is it's rightful master, at this time (which is now Harry, but that is not decisive here).

(I'm going to take it for granted that a reader is observant enough on their own to remember that, for instance, Harry's wand recognizes even Voldy himself, who was the wielder of the yew wand, and so would even more so recognize the yew wand, and would not ask questions like "where is it established that wands can recognize each other individually at all?" ... that's built into the story by the author as a basic parameter: wands can recognize each other as distinct).

3. Therefore, in the "mind" of the elder wand: "the master of the hawthorn wand" now = "master of the elder wand."

4. The Expelliarmus cast by the hawthorn wand in the great hall is cast by the rightful master of the hawthorn wand. With "sentience" being accurate for connections and things in HP if it means things like "vibe," which is, as I have said, the way in which the term is accurate for that world, then the elder wand can get a vibe from the hawthorn wand that the person who cast the spell through the hawthorn wand is its rightful owner, much in the same was as the spider in the woods can "sense" a vibe from the blackthorn wand that the engorgio spell is not being cast by the true master of that wand because Harry was not the one to win it from the snatcher, Ron was. The elder wand can sense obedience, as it were. It may be "more sentient" than others in being able to "discern" finer shades of that, but it really doesn't need to be able to for the mechanics of the story to work, because even basic material can recognize basic affinity versus antipathy between wand and wizard in the form of the spider recognizing that Harry is not the rightful owner of the blackthorn wand, and that's definitely not a case of some special "intelligence" on the part of a wand being the source of the "sentience, not given the blackthorn wand's original owner, because that wand must be on the end of the spectrum better described as "stupid," if Olivander's description is accurate, "the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand" (not much that that wand could learn from the snatcher whom Ron describes as "part troll").

5. Ergo: the elder wand knows that the spell it is meeting is cast by its own true master, the master to whom the hawthorn wand is being obedient, the hawthorn wand that was being obedient in stripping the elder wand from its own master. It doesn't need to know the identity of any of these people, or even necessarily that they are different persons (Harry and Draco) between the two meetings. It just needs to be able to recognize the identity of the hawthorn wand as the wand that beat its (the elder wand) master (DD on top of the tower) and to sense the vibe of right obedience to the present spell caster.

There is this "question" being put forward of the duel in 1945 and how DD won the wand, and it sounds like the "the one it judges the victor ... physical possession is irrelevant" is maybe meant to be an answer to the question of how you beat somebody with an unbeatable wand. But if the wand is what DD himself surmises in Deathly Hallows, a very awesome creation by somebody very gifted and skilled, but still a creation by a human, then it has its limitations. And maybe DD himself really was quite simply pretty bad ass and could outmaneuver and outthink even somebody with that powerful of a weapon, at least when that person was a megalomaniac and with a weakness for monologuing (to borrow that wonderful term from The Incredibles) or other weaknesses; maybe DD really was a Sundance Kid who could nail the can three times in a row while moving (the old witch at OWLs said she saw him to things with a wand she had never seen before); maybe he really could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Maybe "your beatin' Grindlewald don't need explainin.'"

(I'm a fan of "talk nerdy to me" ... cracks me up ... fun fact: the sax line, from the original rap song, is really originally from the song "Hermetico" on Balkan Beat Box's album Nu Med, and I saw BBB 4 of 5 times in NYC while I lived there, one time on the outdoor stage at Lincoln Center and the rest of the times at Webster hall on 11th between 3rd and 4th, just down from Union Sq. ... AWESOME live.)

So, in some of what is out there, a theory by Red Hen was  brought up that involved Harry's path to ownership of the elder wand being by way of Death being the only true master and Harry "beating" death by submitting to death in the forbidden forest. I'm not sure if this is a recent writing in response to the new tweet or from back in the way back of the analysis frenzy immediately after Deathly Hallows hit in 2007. It has some potential in a thematic direction, but while I haven't read this particular piece by RH, I did read a fair bit by her back in those days, and I kind of doubt that she goes in that direction with it.

I can say that, in the very least, I don't favor a reading that says that Harry could not have beaten the elder wand with the hawthorn wand prior to submitting to death in the forest. One could, I suppose, argue that the elder wand does beat him in the forest when it kills him and that even the fact that he is not casting with the hawthorn wand is not a reason the elder wand could have missed his identity, since the holly wand recognizes Voldy without the yew wand. But then, the question would be that: if the wand is able to act as judge between characters connected to it, why did it kill Harry? Of course, maybe it was respecting a wish that it could read Harry as having, a wish to yield to death in the form of not raising the hawthorn wand to defend himself, and the elder wand could read this as a sort of transmission from the hawthorn wand simply by it being in close proximity. Or maybe the elder wand knowingly did not kill Harry; maybe it could read the horcrux situation and also that Harry was submitting to death and so it intentionally didn't kill him and did kill the portion of Voldy's soul ... OR MAYBE ... maybe a lot of things. There are simply a lot of very speculative questions here that really all point, for me, to one thing, which is that you're not going to be able to get "complete" material consistency any more in a fictional world than you are in the real world (we think that that should changed things, being one author and having more "control" ... but after years of editing even research writing and seeing the ways authors will change between plans of expression even mid-sentence ... I don't think so). And, at the end of the day, I don't think that the author going back in with the magic wand of "authorial intent" really solves anything. As I said, I think that the consistency is at a satisfactory enough level in the original as far as why Harry can beat the elder wand with the hawthorn wand in the great hall finale, and I think the going back in just mucks things up.

[Note: as far as the elder wand not being binding on Harry because he did not defend himself, an argument might be made that he brings up this very point of "meaning to die" in relation to the wand's power. BUT, remember that, when he brings it up, he is talking about the wand's lack of power to hold the Hogwarts fighters in silence and that his explanation is that his willingness to die provided them protection ... not that it provided him protection from the wand. It's not that this is evidence for saying that Harry COULD be killed by the wand; it's just saying that the instance doesn't provide any real evidence one way or  the other on whether or not Harry's willingness to die in the woods was a factor in his own protection from the wand in the final showdown in the hall. All that's been stated is that his willingness to die in the woods afforded a protection of the Hogwarts fighters similar to that which his mother's death provided him].

On the most basic level, I think the "death as master" theory is reaching and inventing things needlessly. What's invented here is Death as a distinct character, as a singularity with interactive power (able to recognize willing submission and communicate it to a singular entity like the elder wand, able to be "master" of the wand, the stone, and the cloak, and so on). We've never had this before in Harry Potter; we've never had any anthropomorphic manifestations of universals etc. the way we do in Terry Pratchett's Death and Hogfather. What we do have is Dumbledore, who often functions as JKR's mouthpiece, saying that what is likely the case is that the three brothers were highly gifted and invented these three powerful things and that the death part (the tale) is the type of legend that naturally grows up around those types of happenings and powerful objects.

I suppose one could try to argue that, because DD says he doesn't think they are death's gifts without explaining that he doesn't think death is a personal entity, this means death IS a real person/anthropomorphic manifestation because, otherwise, DD would have clarified that death actually is not a person at all before discussing whether or not certain things personally belong to death ... but that's REALLY grasping at straws ... as if DD always sets out to establish metaphysical parameters or teach a course in ontology every time he said something.

In effect, the "death as the true master" theory is going into making one's own world out of raw Harry Potter material to meet the needs of one's own theories (even if it is the author constructing beyond what they already constructed in the closed canon). I suppose that one could say that they're not saying there is a concrete "personification," but rather just the universal death, or death "in general" ... but it seems really thin to me to talk of a "thing in general" or anything along those lines as being the "master" of specific objects. I think that the core way of putting it is that there is no evidence of a singularity of "death" in Harry Potter that is anywhere near concrete enough to take singular action, including "being" the master of unique physical objects like these. There are just individual deaths: the only singularity is the fact that everybody dies. From what I can remember, the only places we get talk of "death" in this way comes from sources, and only two instances even of that: the tale of the three brothers and the New Testament ("the last enemy to be conquered will be death" on the tombstone in Godric's Hollow).

I'm not trying to be negative on the theorists, I just decidedly disagree. And thus, it's a conversation to which I don't have really much to add except for this post.

The real thing is that the world is overtaking the human story. Red Hen has always been, as far as I can tell, about pinning out what I would call a "physics" of the magical world. That's all fine and good in and of itself, and I actually do think that the physics of magic can be a locus of meaning. I think, for instance, that there is a slight extension of soul through the wand that I think symbolizes extension of the self into the world of another person through language, an extension that can be communion or it can be invasion (and that the AK curse is the soul invading another so radically that [1] it kills the other soul and that [2] it renders the killing soul so unstable that, when the part of the soul that was extended in the invasion comes back through the wand, it can break off, making a horcrux possible). But I think the present frenzy of theory over the "sentience" of the wand is a matter of the world, the physics-of-magic-in-the-wziarding-world, overtaking the human telos of the story.

I think it is fine to be doing this kind of physics and concern with and work in material accuracy. As I have said before, I think that concern for it is an important part of an incarnational aspect of human literature. But there is also the possibility of going from being incarnational to being materialist, which is what I think happens here. And when the author herself buys the preoccupation and starts nervously pandering to it to try to win its approval (hope she's not reading this, because I probably deserve a right royal slap in the face for playing all Dr Freud on this, but it does seem to me that very probably there is some truth in it), you get revisionism that messes with a story that didn't need to be messed with because the cranky-pantsness was just simply that.

The thing is, I don't think any author is going to be able to come up with an alternate universe, or in this case, an alternate aspect (magic) of the real universe, that meets all criticism and analysis on the level of material consistency. I mean ... we can't even completely do it with REAL physics/science, where we have the ability to coordinate the findings of many objective experiments carried on by many parties, so I think it's a bit demanding to require it of a single author with only one subjective vantage point from which to do various tests of models and only limited time to do what can be done if they want to satisfy the hordes screaming for the next book.

I realize that, in hitting on the "human" meaning of the story, I am out of step with a lot that is going on in theory these days, with the last two books I have edited for one university press having a lot to say about the possibility of "machine identity" as "other-than-human agency" arising from the evolution of self-adapting algorithms in the computation of big data and breaking down the dichotomies between human and nonhuman, even between organic and inorganic (and I personally think that a lot of such theorization of "other-tan-human" comes from the painful experience of what humans can do to each other). But there will always be for me a core creedal commitment to a belief in the uniqueness of the human being as the image of God. It's a matter of faith, by its very nature (as based in the supernatural, in God) beyond the realm of verification as fact (beyond the tests in the system of determined causality we call "nature"). And coming out of Genesis 1, I believe that there is a hierarchy that has humans as the crown jewel and pinnacle of creation. I also believe that we have a responsibility to respect the rest of creation and work for its health in addition to our own, and that we have done a piss poor job of it at best. But that doesn't change the reality of the dichotomies and the hierarchy. I'm for human above "other-than-human agency" (although hopefully not despotically or to the detriment of it), and I am for human story above the independent "physics" of the wizarding world. I love that physics and love that she's able to construe meaning in it ... but the meaning still always has to be applicable in some way for a human theme embodied in a narrative.

Star Wars: Last Jedi

I think the same thing is happening with The Last Jedi: in the criticisms and disgruntled feelings of some, the world of "Star Wars" is taking over the human story. I think that it is more important for Luke to work as a character in a story (and I do think that he works as a tension character who shows the tension in human existence, now slightly crazy but still cogent, disillusioned with the possessive formality of the Jedi but not disillusioned with goodness, but also carrying wounds from when he momentarily lost his perspective on how to achieve the good, suffering from the world of fallout that
can come in a split second from a faltering like that) than it is for him to be "what a Skywalker is supposed to be" in the "Star Wars universe. "


Terry Pratchett

Thoughts about Terry Pratchett came to me while thinking about all this. I was mulling over the term "human meaning" and thinking what all that can mean: "symbolic" or "emblematic" etc. And I returned to the question of the imps in the cameras as animism, but in the service of human theme (in this case maybe human epistemology and the fact that any concept we have of any inanimate object is still a bit animated because it is a concept in the minds of us, who are animate) rather than actual animism.  The imps aren't truly "symbolic" or metaphorical. They're really kind of emblematic. They're not symbolic of a trait within humanity or a particular type of person; they are what humans make when looking at nature. And they are quite literal ... there have been real human beings who ascribe real events to real demons. And that started me thinking of the book I am just finishing editing on internet "daemons," the legion of small programs on routers and gateways that regulate flow in the internet. The early version of the internet, called ARPANET, had what were called "Interface Message Processors," of IMPs, for short. I Wonder if Pratchett knew of IMPs in ARPANET. It would totally not surprise me at all. Of course, that may drag interpretation of him away from my "human epistemology" reading of the camera imps, since IMPs in ARPANET are the beginning of new "other-than-human agency" theory, but I wonder if we would ever be able to have any idea that "other-than-human" "agency" is there if it is so completely other-than-human. They speak of the possibility that, at some point, daemons could, on their own, as the step into being true AI, develop communication protocols that humans cannot understand at all, but I wonder, if this does happen, how we would know. Wouldn't the fact that we can't understand what they communicate mean that we can't understand that they are communicative language at all? Lewis can talk about Ransom (in Out of the Silent Planet) being able to recognize something as language without knowing the content, but there is admittedly and undeniably anthropomorphication going on in the  story, and any language we have been able to recognize in the real world has been human language, something passing between humans and interpreted by humans as "communicative" in nature even if the content is unknown; if the divide between organic and inorganic were truly broached or the line between human and nonhuman, and if a machine developed a truly nonhuman language, would theorists in favor of such an evolutionary event even be able to discover it as such?

(I just watched Ex Machina: not my favorite kind of film, very depressing in the end [don't worry, I know the critics are raving about it, and it has some really strong points, but it also has pessimism-for-pessimism's sake points, and I choose to interpret my own way, and while there is some value in some things the critical establishment has to say, and while I know it may be a bit arrogant of me to challenge (or not?), it's not a magisterium for me] maybe along the same lines in tone and content as 2001, but not completely whacked out depressing like The Man Who Fell to Earth ... ANYWAY, there was this interesting thought for me: the AI passes the final TRUE Turing test of the film itself ... the ability to deceive and betray.)