Open at the Close: Literary Essays on Harry Potter

By Cecilia Konchar Farr

Contributions by Lauren R. Carmacci, Keridiana Chez, Kate Glassman, John Granger, Marie Schilling Grogan, Beatrice Groves, Tolonda Henderson, Nusaiba Imady, Cecilia Konchar Farr, Juliana Valadão Lopes, Amy Mars, Christina Phillips-Mattson, Patrick McCauley, Jennifer M. Reeher, Jonathan A. Rose, and Emily Strand

Despite their decades-long, phenomenal success, the Harry Potter novels have attracted relatively little attention from literary critics and scholars. While popular books, articles, blogs, and fan sites for general readers proliferate, and while philosophers, historians, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, and even business professors have taken on book-length studies and edited essay collections about Harry Potter, literature scholars, outside of the children’s books community, have paid few serious visits to the Potterverse. Could it be that scholars are still reluctant to recognize popular novels, especially those with genre labels “children’s literature” or “fantasy,” as worthy subjects for academic study?

This book challenges that oversight, assembling and foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their importance to twenty-first-century literary culture. In Open at the Close, contributors consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one. They interrogate the novels on many levels, from multiple perspectives, and with various conclusions, but they come together around the overarching question: What is it about these books? At their heart, what is it that makes the Harry Potter novels so exceptionally compelling, so irresistible to their readers, and so relevant in our time?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496839336

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Cecilia Konchar Farr

This book took shape as readers in the United States marked twenty years since J. K. Rowling published her first Harry Potter novel here. In those twenty years, a generation of readers came of age with Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they tracked the publication of the series across their teenage years. Midnight book release parties, all day reading binges, cosplay with robes and wands, and long hours of constructing fan theories and fictional fill-ins are among the memories that Millennials take with them into adulthood. And it’s not just Millennials who are having a nostalgic Harry Potter moment. There has never been a more successful book series (500 million copies sold and counting), nor a more culturally prominent literary phenomenon, with three expanding theme parks, ten movies and more in production, multiple followup e-books and short stories, new editions of the original novels (illustrated, translated, available in your House colors), a variety of podcasts, an Internet home in Pottermore, several Hogwarts-themed charitable organizations, and Rowling’s joint envisioning of a grown-up Harry in The Cursed Child, a successful play on the London stage that opened on Broadway and claimed five Tony awards. Still today the series holds a venerable place on the New York Times Bestseller List—for more than 625 weeks as of this writing—and Muggle is officially in the Oxford dictionary.¹ All of this represents an expansive world of Potter-philia.

Yet, despite such phenomenal success, literary critical assessment of Rowling’s novels has lagged behind the parade. While popular books, articles, and blogs for general readers proliferate, while philosophers, historians, theologians, sociologists, psychologists, even business professors have taken on book-length studies and edited essay collections about Harry Potter, literature scholars, outside of the children’s literature community, have paid comparatively little attention to the wizarding world.² This is due, at least in part, to a longstanding reluctance to recognize popular novels, and particularly those with genre labels children’s literature or fantasy, as worthy subjects for academic study, even after years of vociferous protest from scholars in middlebrow and reception studies, new historicism, cultural studies and other disciplines. Despite deconstructing traditional literary categories, challenging the foundation of aesthetic assessments, opening up text to include every artifact of our diverse multimedia cultures, and calling out white male bias in reviewing and publishing, literature professors, graduate students, publishers, and critics still cordon off the important from the trivial.

This book challenges that division, assembling and foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their importance to literate twenty-first-century culture. We’ve taken to calling ourselves Harry Potter scholars, even as most of us toil away in other fields of literature, often fitting this work into the margins of our academic lives. Many of us gather with fans at Harry Potter conferences and festivals around the world and discuss the novels in classrooms and lecture halls, in blogs and on podcasts. In Open at the Close, we consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one. And while we interrogate the novels on many levels, from multiple perspectives and with various conclusions, we come together here as literature scholars to address the overarching questions: What is it about these books? At their heart, what is it that makes these novels so exceptionally compelling, so irresistible to their readers, and so relevant in our time?

Mind the Gap

My attempt at an introductory answer to those questions begins with the three-year gap between the publication dates of Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, from the summer of 2000 all the way through to the summer of 2003. Those were long years of waiting for the news of Voldemort’s return, like Harry hiding behind the hydrangea bushes underneath the Dursleys’ window. What happened, what happened? we kept asking one another, as nearly every reader I know, young or wizened, emerging or practiced, was becoming a critic, formulating their own theories.³

During those same three years in the United States, our world was upended by the terror of 9–11, when the sense of safety and security that many privileged children (and adults) had enjoyed shifted dramatically. Like Harry, young readers in the United States searched for information and explanations and often got, instead, the equivalent of waterskiing budgerigars on the evening news. For this reason, at least in part, those three years were a productive gap, as we say in literary theory. And it was all the more productive for being massive, particularly to young readers. The first four books in the series appeared only a year apart in the United States, and the three that followed only two years apart, so the space between these two middle novels and the nature of the narrative stopping place, at the very moment of Voldemort’s return, at the beginning of the pandemonium of an all-out wizarding war, left readers anxious.

From my multiple perspectives as a mother of readers, a professor of English teaching literature courses, and a reader myself, the sense of urgency of these Harry Potter fans—their desire for news, their need for comfort, even their yearning for escape—changed everything. It conjured a more active readership that multiplied quickly in online forums; MuggleNet started in 1999, and the Leaky Cauldron, in 2000 and then grew exponentially in the years that followed. These readers took matters into their own hands, sharing ideas, and creating their own Harry Potter stories. As they did this, they complicated the relationship between reader and text in ways literary critics had never seen before.

To understand these engaged readers, we need to first grant that the Harry Potter novels are record-setting bestsellers for a reason. They are exceptionally good, particularly the later ones, which meet nearly every criterion of technical excellence we introduce in literature classes (see Strand’s essay in this collection). They have vivid, dynamic characters (see Glassman) and a complex structure around a compelling plot (see Grogan and Konchar Farr and Mars); they deploy innovative and imaginative language (Phillips-Mattson), address complex philosophical (McCauley), psychological (Henderson), and social ideas (Reeher and Camacci) and introduce thought-provoking moral dilemmas (Chez and Lopes). They pay attention to literary tradition in their themes and allusions (Groves and Granger) and draw attention to the issues of our time in their implications (Rose and Imady). And they also seem fresh and funny, even after multiple rereadings. Here, however, I will home in on two reader-centered qualities of literary excellence, what I’ve called elsewhere absorption and relatability, because these two move us closer to understanding what happened to Harry Potter in that productive gap.⁴

I begin with absorption, the one that may be hardest to define. Other literary theorists have different terms for it; it’s one of the reader responses that Janice A. Radway develops in A Feeling for Books, and Rita Felski, in Uses of Literature, theorizes something similar, calling it enchantment. But no matter what we call it, all of us recognize it when we fall into it. It’s that can’t-put-it-down quality, that read-past-any-reasonable-bedtime compulsion that avid readers yearn for. Novels have long been a preferred form of entertainment, especially for women, at least in part because this opportunity for sustained indulgence is so satisfying.⁵ It’s what keeps us waiting for our Hogwarts letters. It’s what inspired my college students when, after studying the Harry Potter novels intensively for three weeks on a study abroad course in London, Oxford, and Edinburgh, they walked into Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World and said, I’m home. The truth is (and don’t tell them I told you) some of them even cried; it felt so overpoweringly familiar, as if they’d been there before.

Absorption has something to do with setting, certainly, and something to do with a plot that draws you in and won’t let you go. If you want to get lost in a book, there has to be a there there, to misappropriate Gertrude Stein. If there is any single quality that can explain why these novels are exceptional, this one may be it. Once you’re in, you’re all in. Some Potterphiles will recall rereading every one of the previous novels before a new one came out and then waiting in line at a midnight release party and spending the rest of the early morning hours nonstop reading. If you were really hooked, you got up late the next day and immediately started rereading the one you just finished. (Not that I would know. Not that I, a grown woman, would ever sternly send my kids to bed so I could have the book to myself.)

Absorption is the gold standard for avid readers. We’re always looking for books that claim us like this, books we can get lost in. And, truthfully, I have never encountered another novel that does this better than the Harry Potter novels do or another author more skilled at it than Rowling, no matter what I think of her personally (more on that in a moment). With this quality, she is masterful. A small indication of how deftly she achieves this is found in how chapters end and begin, how insistently the texts demand that you turn that page. Take this scene from the very beginning of Sorcerer’s Stone, the end of chapter 3 to the beginning of chapter 4:

The lighted dial of Dudley’s watch […] told Harry he’d be eleven in ten minute’s time.

He lay and watched his birthday tick nearer. […]

Five minutes to go. Harry heard something creak outside. […]

Three minutes to go. Was that the sea, slapping hard on the rock like that?

And (two minutes to go) what was that funny crunching noise? Was the rock crumbling into the sea?

One minute to go and he’d be eleven. Thirty seconds … ten … nine—maybe he’d wake Dudley up, just to annoy him—three … two … one … BOOM.

The whole shack shivered and Harry sat bolt upright, staring at the door. Someone was outside, knocking to come in.

I defy anyone, let alone a young impressionable reader, NOT to turn the page.

Turning the page, then:

Chapter Four

BOOM. They knocked again. (45–46)

Most of us know what happens next. It’s like there’s a monster at the end of this chapter, though we find out later it’s just loveable furry old Hagrid. Threshold crossings, dreams ending, niggling questions left unanswered—Rowling consistently ends chapters in a way that makes a reader need to turn the page, even in the later novels aimed at more mature readers. Here are just a few chapter endings from Deathly Hallows, for example: "The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming (159). And Hermione’s hand was suddenly vice-like on his and everything went dark again (267). And this one: The slope-shouldered figure of Alecto Carrow was standing before him, and even as Harry raised his wand, she pressed a stubby forefinger to the skull and snake branded on her forearm" (588).

The second reader-centered quality I highlight here is relatability, because this is often the first quality readers identify when they like a book, using a word that Miriam Webster has not yet recognized.⁶ This book was really relatable, they will say, meaning they connected with it, often through the main character. If a book is relatable, you think: This could have happened to me. With Harry Potter you might take that up a notch to: "This should have happened to me." Rowling manages to excel at this quality, a characteristic of craft, not inexplicable happenstance. In her drive to be a writer, in her years of reading and studying literature (in college and beyond), she certainly encountered lonely boys and smart girls, big, loving families and solitary outsiders, wise mentors and smarmy tormentors. And so, in the Harry Potter novels, she carefully constructs characters who are not only believable but also relatable, characters who readers can enter her books through—characters who aren’t perfect and sometimes not even likable. Many readers have told me, for example, that they relate most deeply to Draco Malfoy or Severus Snape (witness the popularity of the Always tattoo).

Recall how she introduces Harry as just a normal kid, small and skinny for his age with a thin face, knobbly knees, black hair and bright green eyes. He wore hand-me-down clothes and round glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose (20). Ron and Hermione, too, are set up as pretty unremarkable, certainly not charismatic as Cedric Diggory, Cho Chang, or Fleur Delacour. For some of the nerdier readers, there’s Luna Lovegood to enter the texts through, with her strange beliefs and dirigible plum earrings. Carrie Matthews, one of the contributors to our collection of student essays, A Wizard of Their Age, found the unlikely Neville Longbottom an inspiration, exactly the character she needed to get through a tough time in her life. She writes:

Throughout the series I watched this boy with low self-esteem slowly grow into the courageous young man he becomes in Deathly Hallows. This young man, fictional though he may be, has a lack of confidence and an awkwardness that is very relatable.… Neville never stops trying, even when he is completely terrified. (183–84)

The point I underline here, then, is that these novels are popular because they deserve to be. Rowling, the writer, pursued her craft relentlessly, and she mastered these two reader-centered qualities, absorption and relatability, which account for much of her novels’ success. Let’s examine, then, the alchemy of these two qualities and what reactions they produce in proximity. If a book is so absorbing that you can’t put it down, if it’s so relatable you feel like you could happily live inside it, well, maybe if you’re young or hopeful, if the world around you is a mess, you decide to do just that. You move into Hogwarts.

As a former Harry Potter student, now a collections and metadata librarian, Kate McManus writes in her essay Loading the Canon, Rowling often receives credit for getting kids to read, but perhaps she should also be credited with getting kids to write because the burst of fan fictional energy Kate studies was a result of this chemistry (35). Other scholars have written about the phenomenon of reader interaction on the Internet, first by way of Oprah’s Book Club, then Goodreads, and now innumerable sites catering to readers of every sort.⁷ This two-way interaction, super-charged by laptops, tablets, and smartphones, is not new, however. Readers, particularly women readers, have formed groups to discuss novels since there were novels, as in the Women’s Improvement Societies of the late nineteenth century and the Consciousness Raising groups of the early feminist second wave in the United States.⁸ Most of us know someone—a mother, aunt, or friend—who is in a book club, if we’re not in one ourselves. Wherever you find them, readers talk to one another, and sometimes writers, too, join the conversation, historically exchanging letters, and now sharing re-Tweets or Facebook likes. When online groups entered the conversation, early fandom was mostly (and notoriously) active around TV shows. Fans of the X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Star Trek reimagined characters, and Mary-Sue-ed their way into fictional worlds, gayer worlds, worlds full of adventure and sex. Dominated by young women, these fan sites began to turn a two-way interaction into a multidimensional one.⁹

But what I watched happen with Harry Potter fandom was something quite different, what Anne Jamison in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, called a megafandom. According to Percy Weasely—or, actually, Chris Rankin who played Percy in the Harry Potter films and went on to write a senior thesis on Harry Potter fan fiction—what distinguishes this fandom is that they aren’t fans of J. K. Rowling, Warner Bros., Daniel Radcliffe or of any other individual. They are fans of a book series … [I]n their hearts, what they connect with is the literature, Rankin writes (157).

And the fact of this literary connection is significant. I can’t help but think that the immersive and relatable qualities I have cited are some of the things make the Harry Potter universe more than a Fandom. Beyond letters, beyond book group discussions, even beyond fanfic, romantic ships and Alternate Universes (AUs) where Spock is sorted into Ravenclaw, the Harry Potter novels yielded empowered participants, readers who connected deeply with the stories they were reading, felt a sense of ownership because of that connection, and had something to say about the wizarding world they now belonged to. And they also had a worldwide community to say it to. Again, readers entered this magical realm because the texts skillfully invited them in. And arriving there, they felt free to interact, to talk back, to rethink everything from minor plot details to the race and sexuality of characters.

Revolutionary Readers

These readers became a Dumbledore’s Army, a veritable girl gang of radical literary critics who took the novels into their own hands.¹⁰ They talked, some of them wrote, they reread, rethought, and talked some more. When they didn’t like something, they imagined it differently. When the author fell short, they challenged her and filled in the gaps. And, completing this multidimensional sphere of interaction, there has never been a more active author conversing with readers. If you want to know if Dumbledore is gay or Hermione is Black, you ask her, and she’ll tell you—on Pottermore, on a lecture tour, or in a Tweet.

Three brief examples of recent reader responses will illustrate how distinctive, how qualitatively different the Harry Potter literary community has been. The first famously took place at the 2013 National Poetry Slam in New York City, Rachel Rostad’s three-and-half minute performance called, To JK Rowling from Cho Chang.¹¹ This fierce, insistent critique of how the text’s principle Asian character is portrayed was viewed over a million times on YouTube. In it, Rostad addresses Rowling directly, accusing her of taking blind shortcuts through popular culture to create another tragic Asian woman who cries more than she talks, a subordinate, submissive, subplot. Her accusations are relentless, one after the other, and by the end they’re undeniable.

Rostad’s insights cut deep, and the fury that drives her performance is clearly earned. She elaborates, more pointedly, in a follow-up video. The text, she argues, purposely sets up a weak Asian love interest for Harry to make Ginny, Harry’s white love interest, look stronger. And, of course, I doubt that J. K. Rowling was aware of the racist implications, she says, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t critique or question them.¹² Despite the intensity of her critique, Rostad insists that she sees herself as part of the devoted Harry Potter literary community. I grew up on these books, she tells us. For her, Harry Potter was all about equality and compassion. Calling attention to the novels’ shortcomings is an act of loyalty, then. Social justice, she insists, is about holding each other accountable.

The next reader I want to highlight is hard to trace, because she is one of many young bloggers who created portraits of what fandom calls Racebent Hermione, or Black Hermione, mostly on Tumblr, and used textual evidence to support that choice. These images appeared years before Rowling finally allowed the possibility they presented, years before these portraits created such a powerful countercanon that a Black actor was cast as Hermione in The Cursed Child when it opened in London in the summer of 2016. The play went on to win a record-breaking nine awards for British theater in 2017, including Best New Play and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (for the actor who played Hermione), before opening on Broadway in 2018, with the same actor in the Hermione role. Blogger Alanna Bennet, cataloguing and defending Black Hermione on Buzzfeed in February 2015, quotes Junot Díaz:

You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? … what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist? And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.

Rostad’s call for accountability met this reader-empowered spirit that brought us Black Hermione and thrust us into hyperengagement in the pandemic summer of 2020, the final example of reader engagement I want to explore. When Rowling used her sizeable Twitter pulpit to denounce transwomen as something other than women—a topic that had, on the surface, nothing to do with the Harry Potter novels—it tore a painful hole through the fandom. At that time I was moderating a summer reading group for about 100 alumnae at my women’s college, all seven novels in three months, and we immediately lost our way. Putting our schedule aside, we began with a question: Can these novels be saved?

This also took place while our community—Minnesota’s Twin Cities—rose up in protest of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, at the hands of the Minneapolis police. Our school, founded by activist nuns, cherishes their legacy (our senior capstone core course is The Global Search for Justice), so Rowling’s choice to publicly support an outspoken bigot and then follow up with her own (beautifully written) bigotry, presented us with a grim quandary, made even more urgent by the activist context we were living in. And Rostad’s call for accountability won the day. My book clubbers called Rowling out and drew each another in, generously embracing one another’s varied responses and choices while emphatically rejecting the transphobia—or trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF)—that Rowling defended. These two posts are typical of their online conversation. First, Lydia Fasteland, an alumna who works in the book industry:

I definitely have been thinking back to your the author is dead teachings in the last few weeks … and I have made the decision that any continued interaction I have with the novels will be strictly through fan-based organizations, art, fanfic.… I respect people who reject her outright and reject everything she had worked on and I respect people who are choosing to interact with the content in ways not involving her directly. Transwomen are women and her continued stance on this is disappointing.

Another participant, Jessica Remme, an entrepreneur who identifies as queer, wrote:

I have been matching a lot of weird parallels to my Catholic faith and JK’s TERFness. I think in many ways you can quickly dismiss all the beautiful teachings and values of the books because of JK’s views but I also think it’s not just JK’s views that [give us] reasons to dismiss the teachings. There are things in the books like the goblins’ Jewish tropes that could lend to it as well. That being said, I think if we dismissed every work of art or literature because the author, work or artist has/had problems we’d be left with nothing. I think instead we should use them as teaching tools, don’t sweep the elephant under the rug, embrace the good, teach and discuss the bad because the books were written to grow with us. I think it’s a perfect tool to use for these conversations. Also, I think it can be unfair to erase the pain of trans readers by completely writing JK out of the picture. I’m a believer that once your work is in the world it belongs to the reader but also by say we no longer know the author—or JK is dead—gives her a pass.¹³

Most of the fandom came to similar conclusions that summer, posting protrans memes and offering up ideas for protest. Queer the fandom, one Tweeted, urging the creation of more LGBTQIA interventions on TikTok. The moderators of the popular podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text turned their show over to trans readers for a week. The Harry Potter Alliance, a social justice organization that sprang from Potter fandom, MuggleNet and the Leaky Cauldron all condemned Rowling’s position, affirmed that trans women are women, and encouraged readers to continue to use the Harry Potter books to explore their own identities while spreading love and acceptance (from the MuggleNet and Leaky Caudron joint statement). The cast members of the films were among the first to respond, with Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter, affirming the supremacy of the reader:

If these books taught you that love is the strongest force in the universe, capable of overcoming anything; if they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groups; if you believe that a particular character is trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid, or that they are gay or bisexual; if you found anything in these stories that resonated with you and helped you at any time in your life—then that is between you and the book that you read, and it is sacred.¹⁴

Because the response was so immediate, so unanimous, and so typical of the Harry Potter community as it had evolved over the years, many observers missed the fact that these readers had just staged a pretty serious coup. The many ways that they had unabashedly claimed the books as their own culminated here in their separation of the texts from their author. They didn’t need Rowling anymore because the books belonged fully to them, to the readers and the passionate fans. Some day we may mark this as the end of the literary criticism as most of us have known it—seeking a final authoritative interpretation, dominated by white male writers and critics, in the thrall of a few Great Books, and more than occasionally featuring bigotry both veiled and overt that we were invited to overlook. I like to think that it was the summer the New Criticism died. These books are ours now, readers proclaimed. And Dumbledore’s Army rose up and fought for them.

One more thing I would add about these revolutionary readers: I know them. Not all of these young women specifically, but the many women, and a few men, whom I’ve encountered in my Harry Potter classes—and a couple who grew up in my house. And I really like them. I have written elsewhere how they took me by surprise the first time I taught a Harry Potter course (at their request).¹⁵ I didn’t anticipate how much they would teach me or how the thinking I was doing about novels and how they live among us in the United States would be energized by (of all things) a multivolume fantasy series about a British schoolboy.

These inspiring readers and the multidimensional ways they connect with novels are forcing critics who are paying attention to rethink the relationship between reader and text in an age of expanding leadership by people of color and white women in the publishing industry, in our universities, and across the globe. They make me hopeful that this time, with these engaging novels, we literary professionals won’t find an excuse to double down on the critical status quo by reinforcing the walls that marginalize popular texts and amateur readings, by shoring up the fences that forestall passionate engagement. If Harry Potter readers are any indication, studying literature will change. The texts we examine may be less sacred but more loved, their authors less revered but more alive (and more accountable), and leadership in the classroom and beyond will be more justice-centered, more aware of race and culture and more willing to speak truth to power.

Under the Bonnet

In this collection, we Potter professors aim to honor these active readers and to enact the hopeful vision of literary criticism that their passion inspires. In the following chapters we expand on concepts that often grew out of classroom conversations with undergraduate Harry Potter readers. Several of the writers assembled here have published book-length works on the novels, and several more are just beginning their careers as professors or critics, though they have been studying Harry Potter for most of their lives. Chapters representing various contemporary critical perspectives, both text and reader-centered, comprising postcolonial theory, feminist, queer and gender studies, digital and medical humanities, literary history, language and genre studies, eco-criticism, linguistic analysis, trauma studies and critical race theory, make up this collection, and it includes scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Canada, and Syria.

The book is divided into two parts: Horcruxes, highlighting seven textcentered close readings, and Hallows, placing the novels in social and cultural contexts. Chapter 8, straddling the middle of the collection, examines the state of literary criticism itself and how the Harry Potter novels call it into question. I lead off the Horcruxes section with an essay authored jointly with Amy Mars, a St. Catherine University librarian, examining the generally accepted premise that the novels get increasingly more difficult as readers (and characters) progress through the series. This chapter also functions as introductory, in that we