Sunday, June 3, 2012

Hypothetical Metaphysical Nonsense and Harry Potter


(by Chris Wei)

One Black Friday, Harry Potter went to Walmart and got trampled by a crazed crowd.  It wasn’t really Harry, of course; it was Daniel Radcliffe.  The real Harry Potter has never been to Walmart.

You might think me mad for suggesting that Harry Potter is real.  You might think it a foolish idea that Harry exists independently of the imagination of J. K. Rowling—the British woman who invented him in 1990.  She liked to be called Jo Rowling then.  Jo was riding a train from Manchester to London when the idea of a spectacled scar-faced wizard boy came to her mind.  She didn’t know at the time what sort of phenomenon Harry Potter would become.  She didn’t know that, seven years after that train ride, the character she’d created would spawn a decade and a half of books and films and merchandise.  She didn’t know he’d become an international celebrity.

Another thing Jo Rowling didn’t know was that Harry Potter wasn’t her creation at all.  He existed, and still exists today, totally independent of her.  Despite her years of labored creativity, she was not really a creator:  she was a medium.

It is like this with all narratives.  Stories are not just stories.  Stories are truths, unlocked and uncovered and given to the world.  Stories are a mirror to reality, and that mirror is sometimes more accurate than we’d like to imagine.  Some stories, like Harry Potter’s, portray another world that really exists but of which we had previously been unaware.  Other stories create worlds, and as soon as we are aware of them, they become.

Take, for example, the story of Shane Gunderson.  You don’t know Shane, and neither do I.  He is the main character of a fiction I am about to invent.  But as soon as I create this fiction, Shane will become more than words on a page.  Shane will exist.  Shane will take on reality, and at least in one Universe, he will have feelings.  He will have experiences.  And eventually, like all men, Shane will die.

On second thought, maybe I will not tell you about Shane.  Is it better to abort than to murder?

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