By JOHN LICHFIELD
PARIS - In the sober columns of Le Monde, a debate is raging which slices to the heart of the political and philosophical concerns of the early 21st century.
Is Harry Potter a capitalist neo-liberal? Or is he an anti-globalist lefty, concerned by the fate of the humble and
the oppressed?
The opinion pages of the centre-left, French daily - more often occupied with human cloning or Third World debt - have, over the last three weeks, been examining, in high Marxist-structuralist manner, the political subtext of the works of J. K. Rowling.
The Great Debate was launched on June 4 by Ilias Yocaris, of the Institut Universitaire de Formation de Maitres (secondary teacher training school) in Nice.
Yocaris, one of the people responsible for training the next generation of French teachers, complained in Le Monde that the "fantasy universe of Harry Potter is ... a capitalist universe".
The five Harry Potter books - enormously successful in French translation - are stiffed with "neo-liberal stereotypes" which caricature approvingly the "excesses of the Anglo-Saxon social model", Yocaris said.
Thus all representatives of the state (the Ministry of Magic) are lampooned as ridiculous, or incompetent or sinister. Harry goes to a "private" school, whose "micro-society" is a "pitiless jungle" which glorifies "individualism, competition and a cult of violence".
Public institutions are unable to protect individuals: Harry Potter and his friends find that they have to break the magical state-imposed rules constantly to protect themselves from evil forces.
Yocaris says that the Harry Potter books are an example of the totalitarian universe imagined by George Orwell, come to life. "Capitalism is now trying to shape, after its own taste, not only the real world, but the imaginary world of its consumer-citizens."
Now Le Monde has published an equally erudite reply to Yocaris' thesis.
Far from being a capitalist lackey, Harry Potter is, in fact, the first fictional hero of the anti-globalist, anti-free market, pro-Third World, "Seattle"generation, according to Isabelle Smadja.
Smadja, who teaches philosophy at the Lycee Loritz in Nancy, suggests that Yocaris has been confused by the fact that the Potter books are, themselves, such a global, commercial and marketing success. Examination of the text suggests that they are, in fact, a "ferocious critique of consumer society and the world of free enterprise".
The magical world created by Rowling is, Smadja declares, suffused with the ideas of "other-worldism", the name given to the anti-global movement in France.
Harry and his friends show creditable concern for the "house elves", the unpaid servants of the magical world. That the elves are mostly content with their lot is, says Smadja, a "pertinent" critique of globalisation. "Poor countries are so blinded and attracted by the system which exploits them that they have no desire to revolt against it".
French intellectuals have struggled from the beginning to come to terms with the great success of the Potter books and movies. There have been previous interpretations, suggesting that the books are "anti-progressive" and "sexist". There have also been complaints in France that many of the wicked characters in the books have French names.
In a response to the first ("Harry is a neo-liberal capitalist") article, a Le Monde reader mocked the tendency of some French intellectuals to wallow in ideological abstraction.
"A question presents itself," Vincent de Longueville from Paris asked in the newspaper's letters column. "Was Ilias Yocaris ever young?"
- INDEPENDENT
By JOHN LICHFIELD
PARIS - In the sober columns of Le Monde, a debate is raging which slices to the heart of the political and philosophical concerns of the early 21st century.
Is Harry Potter a capitalist neo-liberal? Or is he an anti-globalist lefty, concerned by the fate of the humble and
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