촘스키가 포스트모더니스트들한테 웬 아무데서나 빌어먹을 '이론'이냐고 했다더니..르 몽드 지에 실렸던 해리 포터에 대한 쓸데없이 진지한 프랑스 학자들간의 공방 - 해리 포터는 앵글로 색슨식 자유 시장 경제 자본주의를 전파한다 vs 안티 글로벌리제이션에 자유시장 경제에 대한 통렬한 비판이다 - 을 정리하면서 타임즈지에 다음과 같은 기사가 실렸습니다. 이런 '해체'와 '이론화'의 시도가 '의도하지 않았겠지만 매우 우습고, 거의 이해 불가능하며, 완벽하게 무의미하다'면서요. 그냥 애들 책인데 너무 행간을 읽으려고 오바했다는 거죠. 게다 이걸 'theorising'이라고 부른다면 말이에요.



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Harry Potter deconstructs the mystery of French intellectuals

Ben Macintyre


POOR Harry Potter. He has survived dementors, goblins, werewolves and Lord Voldemort himself, only to run into that most cunning and baffling of foes: the French intellectual.

Last month Le Monde published an article deconstructing the works of J.K. Rowling and arguing, in high-flown prose, that the boy-wizard is nothing less than a capitalist oppressor, a neoliberal apostle of Anglo-Saxon social brutalism. The world of Hogwarts, wrote Ilias Yocaris, Maître de conférences of French Literature at the Institut Universitaire de Formation de Maîtres in Nice, is a “pitiless jungle”, characterised by “ individualism, excessive competition and a cult of violence”.

Pas du tout, declared Isabelle Smadja, philosophy professor at the Lycée Loritz in Nancy. Responding with her own Le Monde article, she insisted that Harry is truly a creature of the Left, an anti-globalist child of Seattle, opposed to free markets, supportive of the weak and oppressed, and no doubt a drinker of ethically-produced coffee. So far from promoting capitalism, she declared, the Potter oeuvre is “a ferocious critique of consumer society and the world of free enterprise”.

It was inevitable that les intellos would eventually get round to analysing Rowling, for grown-ups have been steadily encroaching on what should be sovereign children’s territory ever since Potter first appeared in print. Almost 30 per cent of the first four Harry Potter books were bought for readers aged 35 and over.

The literary critic Harold Bloom dismissed Harry Potter as “goo”. He was wrong; these are brilliant, captivating children’s books. I have read every word of the series —aloud — to my children. Some books, nominally for children, are written on two levels. Alice in Wonderland is a surreal fairy tale, but also a parody on injustice; Lord of the Rings is about the corruption of power. A modern equivalent of such double-layered culture might be The Simpsons, which provides equal enjoyment to my four-year-old daughter and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Harry Potter books, however, offer little in the way of psychological or moral complexity. These are not allegories for our times, but simple, well-written tales intended to be read to or by children. By pretending that Harry Potter is adult fare we do it, and literature in general, a profound disservice.

It is a measure of J.K. Rowling’s unprecedented success that Harry Potter has become so deeply embedded in the culture that adults feel obliged to find more in the books than meets the eye. When scholars, linguists, analysts, anti-racists, Jungians, Freudians, Jungian-Freudians, sociologists, lawyers, philosophers, psychologists and literary critics start clustering around a child’s book, it is time to stop reading between the lines.

Much of the “scholarship” surrounding Harry Potter is unintentionally hilarious, virtually incomprehensible, and perfectly pointless. Yet the phenomenon is fascinating for the way it exposes our preoccupations: adults have projected their own concerns on to these books, and the results say far more about us than about Harry Potter. Here are some categories in this weird and expanding sub-genre:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Thatcherism: since Harry wants a gold cauldron rather than a pewter one, and always gets a fancier style of broomstick, he is an apostle of consumerism and a pro-Establishment stooge. Hogwarts, by this interpretation, is an elitist Eton of wizardry.

Harry Potter and the Revolution: faced by the Ministry of Magic’s bourgeois rules, Harry and his comrades act in defiance of a state run by a self-perpetuating elite controlling the means of producing magic. Harry has the same spectacles as Trotsky.

Harry Potter and the Feminist Backlash: there is only one major female character; she wears glasses and is a super-intelligent swot; this is an anti-woman caricature. For more on this theme, if you can stomach it, read Hermione Granger and the Heritage of Gender by Eliza Dresang.

Harry Potter and the Philosophers: he is a Nietzschean, or a Stoic, or a Nazi, or Jesus, or anyone else you like, really.

Harry Potter and the Christian Fundamentalists: witchcraft is evil. Er, that’s it. (Y’all wanna go burn someone now?) Harry Potter and the Secret Racism: some wizards believe that they are a superior race to mere human beings, or Muggles; those of mixed blood are discriminated against as “mudbloods”. Never mind that Rowling condemns Draco Malfoy’s racism with thumping sincerity, some academic investigators have still managed to detect the racist myth of the “happy slave” in the depiction of house-elves who (with one exception) don’t want to be free, and cannot cope with freedom when they get it.

Harry Potter and the European Union: a lawyer, Susan Hall, has gone to the trouble of analysing the wizard legal system in order to arrive at the conclusion that the Ministry of Magic contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.

Harry Potter and the Gobbets of Tosh: here is a direct quotation from Jungian analyst Gail Grynbaum describing Harry’s encounter with the magic mirror. “This in alchemical terms is a ‘whitening’, an albedo time of reflection . . . a time to experience the transformative power of Hermes-Mercury.” (No it’s not; it’s a magic mirror.) There is much, much more of this theorising. I shall leave you to imagine the horrors of Harry Potter and anal-phase aggression.

Some children’s books are worthy of adult literature. A few even deserve textual analysis. Most are not. Some children’s books have hidden, or not so hidden, adult subtexts (Remember Little Black Sambo?). But most don’t. The endless pseudo-scholarly theorising over Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer reflects a culture that finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between childish entertainment and adult intellectual nourishment.

As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a children’s book is just for children.


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롤링은 현재 영국사회를 별 문제 의식 없이 그냥 받아들이는 것 같아요. 판타지이지만 현실적인 세계이기도 하니까 말이 되겠죠. 롤링은 자신의 적당히 관습적이고 적당히 보수적이면서도 적당히 리버럴한, 영국의 교육 받은 중산층이 가지는 클리셰들을 고대로 글에서 드러내고 있지요. 그러니까 예민한 프랑스 지식인분들이 앵글로 색슨식 신자유주의 시장 질서에 대한 '옹호'와 시장경제와 기업가들의 세계에 대한 '저항'을 동시에 읽어낸 거겠죠. 워낙 많이 팔린 덕에 영향력이 큰 책이 되어버려서 그런지 모르지만, 애들이 오로지 <해리 포터> 책 하나만 읽고 세계관을 결정하는 것도 아닌데 좀 지나친 호들갑 같기도 해요.

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해리 포터를 비판한 프랑스 학자의 글이 뉴욕 타임즈에 번역되어서 실렸더군요.


Harry Potter, Market Wiz

By ILIAS YOCARIS

he 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.



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송두율씨가 집행유예로 석방되었다면서요? 축하할 일입니다. 간첩 운운은 별 증거가 없고, 거기다 남의 머리 속에 든 생각을 가지고 재판을 한다는 건 정말 웃기는 얘기죠. 돌로레스 엄브리지 같은 검사들이 '반성'의 기미가 안보인다고 디텐션 주는 것 같았거든요...국보안법이 빨리 폐지되었으면 좋겠어요.

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