Harry Potter, un non non

French Marxist attacks 'bourgeois' Harry Potter

By John Lichfield in Paris

ndependent.co.uk

28 January 2001

Harry Potter is a sexist neo-conservative meritocrat who perpetuates a "degrading image of women". The French newspaper Libération has published the first extended, Marxist-structuralist analysis of the works of J K Rowling.

Would-be "progressive", "non-élitist" and "non-sexist" children are urged to avoid the politically incorrect symbolism of the four Potter books, which have sold more than a million copies in France.

Harry Potter, the trainee wizard, may look like an "intellectual" with his glasses and his unruly hair, writes Pierre Bruno. Once "deconstructed," he is "only too clearly" the hero of a "political allegory" of the triumph of the socially ascendant (on broomsticks presumably) petite bourgeoisie.

Mr Bruno, a university lecturer in Dijon and author of a book on adolescent culture, has applied the principles of structuralist literary criticism and Marxist social analysis – the twin pillars of French left-wing intellectualism – to the wizard from 4 Privet Drive.

His critique has touched off an impassioned defence of Harry and Rowling by French publishers, teachers and parents in the same newspaper. How, they ask, can a book be socially undesirable if it helped a generation of children to rediscover reading?

The charge of "sexism," they say, does not stick. Harry's friend Hermione – inaccurately presented by Mr Bruno as a stupid, ineffectual bookworm – is a brilliant scholar who plays a pivotal role in most of the books' comic-horrific adventures. The violent game of Quidditch, played on broomsticks, is a unisex sport, in which girls excel alongside the boys (unlike, say, boules).

Mr Bruno is unrepentant. Rowling, he says, has failed – despite having studied in Paris – to take account of the "critical theories of literature disseminated by higher education". She has not applied the ideas of such great French thinkers as the structuralist Roland Barthes and the unreconstructed Marxist sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Instead, her "traditionalist" and "conservative" political symbolism is "only too obvious" Mr Bruno says. The four houses at the Hogwarts' School – Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw – are competing social groups. Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are the lower orders, hard-working but stupid. Slytherin "represents the propertied-classes" and Gryffindor – Harry's house – the "ascendant" class of the bourgeoisie.

The whole series, he says, is not about the struggle of Good and Evil (as millions of children have wrongly surmised) but about the "conflict between established and rising classes".

Mr Bruno finds no place in his deconstruction of Harry Potter for the most terrifying characters in the series: the Dementors, faceless, hooded figures whose very presence chills the heart and sucks joy from the bones. Perhaps they come too close to home.

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© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd.

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Answers

Who gives a shit, frogophile.

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Homer Simpson masquerades as a proletarian Everyman but Marxist post-structural analysis proves him to be a running dog of the Capitalists.

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