[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Harry Potter, Market Wiz

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Harry Potter, Market Wiz

July 18, 2004
 By ILIAS YOCARIS 



 

The success of the Harry Potter series has provoked a
lively discussion among French literary theorists about the
novels' underlying message and the structure of Harry's
school, Poudlard (Hogwarts). This article, which appeared
last month in the French daily Le Monde, got particular
attention, including an essay published in response arguing
that Harry is an antiglobalist crusader. 

NICE, France - With the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling
has enchanted the world: the reader is drawn into a magical
universe of flying cars, spells that make its victims spew
slugs, trees that give blows, books that bite, elf
servants, portraits that argue and dragons with pointed
tails. 

On the face of it, the world of Harry Potter has nothing in
common with our own. Nothing at all, except one detail:
like ours, the fantastic universe of Harry Potter is a
capitalist universe. 

Hogwarts is a private sorcery school, and its director
constantly has to battle against the state as represented,
essentially, by the inept minister of Magic, Cornelius
Fudge; the ridiculous bureaucrat Percy Weasley; and the
odious inspector Dolores Umbridge. 

The apprentice sorcerers are also consumers who dream of
acquiring all sorts of high-tech magical objects, like high
performance wands or the latest brand-name flying brooms,
manufactured by multinational corporations. Hogwarts, then,
is not only a school, but also a market: subject to an
incessant advertising onslaught, the students are never as
happy as when they can spend their money in the boutiques
near the school. There is all sorts of bartering between
students, and the author heavily emphasizes the possibility
of social success for young people who enrich themselves
thanks to trade in magical products. 

The tableau is completed by the ritual complaints about the
rigidity and incompetence of bureaucrats. Their mediocrity
is starkly contrasted with the inventiveness and audacity
of some entrepreneurs, whom Ms. Rowling never ceases to
praise. For example, Bill Weasley, who works for the goblin
bank Gringotts, is presented as the opposite of his
brother, Percy the bureaucrat. The first is young, dynamic
and creative, and wears clothes that "would not have looked
out of place at a rock concert"; the second is
unintelligent, obtuse, limited and devoted to state
regulation, his career's masterpiece being a report on the
standards for the thicknesses of cauldrons. 

We have, then, an invasion of neoliberal stereotypes in a
fairy tale. The fictional universe of Harry Potter offers a
caricature of the excesses of the Anglo-Saxon social model:
under a veneer of regimentation and traditional rituals,
Hogwarts is a pitiless jungle where competition, violence
and the cult of winning run riot. 

The psychological conditioning of the apprentice sorcerers
is clearly based on a culture of confrontation: competition
among students to be prefect; competition among Hogwarts
"houses" to win points; competition among sorcery schools
to win the Goblet of Fire; and, ultimately, the bloody
competition between the forces of Good and Evil. 

This permanent state of war ends up redefining the role of
institutions: faced with ever-more violent conflicts, they
are no longer able to protect individuals against the
menaces that they face everywhere. The minister of magic
fails pitifully in his combat against Evil, and the
regulatory constraints of school life hinder Harry and his
friends in defending themselves against the attacks and
provocations that they constantly encounter. The apprentice
sorcerers are thus alone in their struggle to survive in a
hostile milieu, and the weakest, like Harry's schoolmate
Cedric Diggory, are inexorably eliminated. 

These circumstances influence the education given the young
students of Hogwarts. The only disciplines that matter are
those that can give students an immediately exploitable
practical knowledge that can help them in their battle to
survive. 

That's not astonishing, considering how this prestigious
school aims to form, above all, graduates who can compete
in the job market and fight against Evil. Artistic subjects
are thus absent from Hogwarts's curriculum, and the
teaching of social sciences is considered of little value:
the students have only some tedious courses of history.
It's very revealing that Harry finds them "as boring as
Percy's reports cauldron-bottom report." In other words, in
the cultural universe of Harry Potter, social sciences are
as useless and obsolete as state regulation. 

Harry Potter, probably unintentionally, thus appears as a
summary of the social and educational aims of neoliberal
capitalism. Like Orwellian totalitarianism, this capitalism
tries to fashion not only the real world, but also the
imagination of consumer-citizens. The underlying message to
young fans is this: You can imagine as many fictional
worlds, parallel universes or educational systems as you
want, they will still all be regulated by the laws of the
market. Given the success of the Harry Potter series,
several generations of young people will be indelibly
marked by this lesson. 

Ilias Yocaris is a professor of literary theory and French
literature at the University Institute of Teacher Training
in Nice. This article was translated by The Times from the
French. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/opinion/18YOCA.html?ex=1091176042&ei=1&en=d13a96e0800eb3f4


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