Re-Reading Harry Potter

Second Edition

Suman Gupta
 Re-Reading Harry Potter

10.1057/9780230279711 - Re-Reading Harry Potter, Suman Gupta

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Also by Suman Gupta

LITERATURE AND GLOBALIZATION

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONIST IDENTITY POLITICS AND LITERARY STUDIES
THE THEORY AND REALITY OF DEMOCRACY: A Case Study in Iraq
THE REPLICATION OF VIOLENCE: Thoughts on International Terrorism

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after 11 September 2001
CORPORATE CAPITALISM AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
MARXISM, HISTORY, AND INTELLECTUALS: Toward a Reconceptualized
Transformative Society
V. S. NAIPAUL (Writers and Their Work Series)
TWO TEXTS AND I: Disciplines of Knowledge and the Literary Subject

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Re-Reading Harry Potter
Second Edition

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Suman Gupta
Professor of Literature and Cultural History
The Open University

10.1057/9780230279711 - Re-Reading Harry Potter, Suman Gupta

chs 1–21 and 24 and bibliography © Suman Gupta 2009;
ch. 22 © Milena Katsarska 2009 ch. 23 © Suman Gupta and
Cheng Xiao 2009
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted

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save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified
as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21957–1 hardback
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Contents

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Acknowledgements vii

Part I The Text-to-World Approach (2002) 1

1 Book Covers 3

2 Children and Adults 8

3 The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects 14

4 Text-to-World Assumptions (Some General Definitions) 24

5 A Thought about Open and Closed Texts 29

6 The Irrelevance of J.K. Rowling 33

7 Children’s Literature 40

8 Fantasy Literature 55

9 Religious Perspectives 67

10 Locations and Limitations 75

Part II Reading the Harry Potter Novels (2002) 83

11 Three Worlds 85

12 Repetition and Progression 93

13 Evasive Allusions 97

14 Blood 99

15 Servants and Slaves 111

16 The Question of Class 121

17 Desire 127

18 The Magic System of Advertising 133

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vi Contents

19 Movie Magic 141

20 The Beginning 151

Part III World-to-Text (2008) 165

21 Reading Re-Reading Harry Potter 167

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22 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 183

23 Harry Potter in China 198

24 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 217

Notes 237

Bibliography 260

Index 274

10.1057/9780230279711 - Re-Reading Harry Potter, Suman Gupta

Acknowledgements

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I am grateful to colleagues of the Open University Literature Department
for allowing me the space and time to write this book. The School of
Arts at Roehampton University has provided me with access to the facil-
ities of that institution. I have used these extensively and am grateful
to colleagues at the School. Thanks are due to numerous friends – even
those who were noncommittal or dismissive – with whom I have dis-
cussed parts of this study. Readers and editors for Palgrave Macmillan
have made significant contributions in finalizing the book. As always,
and despite her doubts about these formal gestures, I particularly
acknowledge Xiao Cheng’s contribution to the process of writing this.
I have thrashed out most of the ideas here with her before committing
them to paper. My son, Ayan-Yue Gupta, played a substantial part in
my thinking about the area of this study.

This book has not been prepared, authorized or endorsed by J.K. Rowling,
the publishers or distributors of the Harry Potter books or the creators,
producers or distributors of the Harry Potter movies.

“Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone”

Copyright © J.K. Rowling 1997

“Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets”

Copyright © J.K. Rowling 1998

“Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban”

Copyright © J.K. Rowling 1999

“Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire”

Copyright © J.K. Rowling 2000

“Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix”

Copyright © J.K. Rowling, 2003

“Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince”

Copyright © J.K. Rowling, 2005

“Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows”

Copyright © J.K. Rowling, 2007

vii

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 Part I

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The Text-to-World Approach

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1
Book Covers

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I begin, as most readers must, with book covers. Book covers are drawn
into the interstices of reading, as inattentively observed or casually
overlooked as a pub such as the Leaky Cauldron might be in London.
The images and words on book covers convey a fleeting first impression
of what may be in the book, arouse expectations; book covers draw
certain readers in, select them as they select the book; book covers tacitly
mould readers’ expectations and influence reading by the fulfilment or
failure of those initial expectations. Every time a book is opened yet
again the reader’s gaze passes thoughtlessly over the covers and some-
thing of their first influence is rekindled. Yet the part of book covers in
making a (quite possibly lasting) formative impression on the reader
may be forgotten under the weight of their all too tangible and
constant material usefulness as the recognizable surfaces, protective
coverings, of particular editions. The materiality and material usefulness
of book covers often obscure their role in the process of reading. Yet
book covers are implicated in the process of reading even before the
reader engages with the text that is ‘contained’ between them. On book
covers the covert machinations of the industry that mediates the passage
of books between authors and readers are obviously and yet disarmingly
casually presented to view. The point is hardly worth labouring: so I
begin, as most readers inevitably do (but perhaps more attentively than
is usual), with book covers.
I have two Bloomsbury copies of each of the following1 before me as I
write this: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Stone
hereafter), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chamber hereafter),
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Prisoner hereafter) and Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Goblet hereafter). One of the two copies of
each is directed at children and the other at adults. I know this because

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4 Re-Reading Harry Potter

the covers of children’s copies of Stone, Chamber, Prisoner and Goblet

have quite different images from the adults’ copies of the same titles.
This is especially intriguing because that is the only significant difference
between the children’s copies and the adults’ copies. In every other
respect the differences are minor: there is a slight price difference (the
adults’ copies cost a jot more), the print of the adults’ copies is marginally

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smaller, the reviews quoted on the back covers are not the same (but
similar). The texts within – from bibliographical details and dedications
to conclusions – are identical in the children’s copies and their adults’
counterparts. The images on the covers mainly identify the children’s
copies as being for children and the adults’ copies of exactly the same
texts as being for adults. Images, in brief, distinguish the ostensible
readerships of these particular editions.
The texts are the same but the images tell different stories, and therefore
may lie at the interstices of reading and mould the process of reading,
in unobtrusively different ways. The children’s copies have sharply
defined and cheerfully coloured paintings, cartoon-strip in effect,
crowded, action-packed images presented with self-conscious artifice.
Images spill over from the front cover onto the back, colours clash with
each other vividly in the letters of the title and their backdrops. The
flashy images appear to move towards the reader in unexpectedly
engaging ways: the Hogwarts Express of the children’s Stone seems to
rush headlong towards the reader and a somewhat exaggeratedly myopic
Harry; Mr. Weasley’s flying car charges straight through the clouds at
the reader on the children’s Chamber; the Hippogriff of the children’s
Prisoner flies just over the reader’s nose (sharply focused before a gigantic
moon like the ET bicycle of Spielberg’s film); the Hungarian Horntail
dragon looms threateningly over Harry and the reader on the children’s
Goblet. Harry is easily recognized by the lightning scar on his forehead.
The action places Harry and the reader in close proximity: the reader is
not a voyeur who participates in the desirable action from a titillating
distance, but someone who is visually and immediately so close to
Harry that they could well merge. This reader can vicariously become
Harry. This is presumably the child reader, innocently captured by the
flash of colours, the whirl of action and naively drawn into empathizing
with the hero who is in the midst of it all. Some of the same motifs
appear on the adults’ book covers, but the images are dark and subdued.
These are black-and-white photographs or photo-collages, confined
within a geometrically defined space on the front cover. There is a quaint
steam train puffing along on the cover of the adult Stone; a 1950s-looking
car emptily wading through clouds on the adult Chamber; a lonely and

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 Book Covers 5

somewhat awkwardly assembled half-eagle half-horse suspended over

some cotton-wool clouds on the adult Prisoner; and a photograph of
what is distinctly a Chinese dragon (stuff of myths) on the adult Goblet.
The motifs are the same as on the children’s book covers, but dislocated
from the action of the story for there is no Harry and friends in their
midst: no Harry looking astonished, or Harry being matey with Ron, or

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Harry with an alarmed Hermione clutching on to him, or Harry dodg-
ing dragons. The motifs are dislocated from their instrumental roles
within the novels and stand out stark and lonely on the adult covers,
held at a distance by their quaintness, made remote by the nostalgic tint
of black-and-white photographs. Revealed thus in all their strangeness
they appear to acquire mysteriously symbolic meanings, connotations
that are reminiscent of something that cannot be remembered. The
reader is held at a distance, invited to retreat into a past, black-and-white
world, left alone with some faintly intrigued feeling and some mildly
questioning sensations. This is presumably the adult reader, a wistful,
self-possessed, thoughtful person with a black-and-white past.
The child reader and adult reader so characterized are the ‘implied
readers’ of these book covers; these book covers predispose the reader to
the books and thereby also predispose the books for the reader.
Old theoretical quarrels lurk behind the phrase ‘implied reader’. It
was reasonably clear to Wolfgang Iser (responsible for that phrase) that
a dialectical relationship exists between the reader and the text of a
literary work (and to some extent any text).2 A reader brings certain
necessarily unique associations, attitudes, beliefs, experiences to her
reading; the literary work presents a juxtaposition of words, phrases,
sentences, descriptions, narratives, etc. The two interact and readings
are produced which are necessarily different for different readers. And
yet readings (insofar as they relate to particular literary works and some
common ground in human experience and expression) also open the
possibility of discussion and exchange about what is accepted as being
the same text. It is the latter that primarily interested Iser – a literary work
is always that particular literary work (despite different possible readings)
because the given text guides the process of reading to some extent.
In other words, the text of a literary work has an ‘implied reader’:

He embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to

exercise its effect – predispositions laid down, not by empirical outside
reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as
a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text;
he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader.3

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6 Re-Reading Harry Potter

This concept of the ‘implied reader’, which is naturally attractive and

useful, gave rise to a series of disagreements. Stanley Fish argued that to
derive the reader so single-mindedly from the text of a literary work is
to miss the point. The process of reading is more comprehensively
directed by certain assumptions about how to read and understand
texts that exist among specific critics (or the ‘interpretive strategies’ that

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are agreed upon by an ‘interpretive community’), so much so that it is
questionable whether a particular text can be said to have any discrete
and determinative existence at all.4 A waspish exchange followed
between Iser and Fish. 5 Others felt that both Iser’s and Fish’s were rather
fanciful and abstract ways of trying to come to grips with the process
of reading: the thing to do is to study carefully how actual readers read –
to actualize the reader.6 And yet others maintained that this whole
business of focusing on reading alone at the expense of everything else
was misguided and overstated. 7
With the Bloomsbury covers of the Harry Potter books in mind it is
immediately evident that though I have found it convenient to use
Iser’s phrase to clarify their effect – and have made that an excuse for
a brief excursion into some pedantic-sounding arguments from the
1970s and 1980s – nothing else about Iser’s thoughts are relevant here.
And nor, for that matter, are those of his immediate opponents. Readers,
in this instance, have not been implied by the text (as written words)
but by the covers. There is no point in turning to anyone else who pon-
dered Iser at that time to come to grips with this curious phenomenon.
All of those mentioned above shared at least this with Iser: they were
concerned with the status of the text in relation to the reader and vice
versa, and not with covers of particular editions. Their understanding of
the text of a literary work never included the book covers. Book covers
were too trivial for their attention.
But book covers do matter for the Harry Potter series. What is clear
here is that different ‘implied readers’ have been distinctly and discernibly
suggested without any reference to what is conventionally regarded as
the text of a literary work. This is certainly not unique to the Harry Potter
series (think of all the different book covers for the same text that we
constantly encounter as readers). But the confidence and simplistic clarity
with which this is done on the Harry Potter books is striking. The effect
of this brash confidence in the impact of book covers, in the shells of
books, is one of diminishing the substance of the text – those written
pages – to some extent. It makes me aware, quite against my usual habits,
of the degree to which the Harry Potter series, and what Jack Zipes has
called the Harry Potter ‘phenomenon’,8 are about something that

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 Book Covers 7

appears not to be confined to the text or its ‘implied readers’ or, for that
matter, actual readers or even the ‘interpretive strategies’ of ‘interpretive
communities’. It seems to have more to do with images and the produc-
tion of images and the place of images in producing, advertising and
marketing books. Is that indeed the case?
For the moment I simply leave that question suspended there.

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But have I revisited those somewhat rusty reader-response theories
only to say they are not relevant to me? Did I need to take so circuitous
a route to make my rather obvious point? Well – not entirely. I am
actually primarily interested in the question of reading texts, and what
that means for the specific matter of reading the Harry Potter series (the
printed pages thereof). My discussion of book covers here is mainly to
lead into the written words and their reception. I have ideas to ponder
about reading texts, especially apropos the Harry Potter books, for which
this brief prelude on reader-response is bound to be useful – eventually.
Much would get clarified when I get down, gradually and unhur-
riedly, to explaining what exactly this essay is about. I wish to say no
more for the moment than that this essay is about the political and social
implications of the Harry Potter books, or the political and social effects that
constitute the Harry Potter phenomenon. I say no more for the moment
(what did that mean?) and instead allow myself to be distracted by what
the book covers have conveyed to me: the distinction between adult
readers and child readers. I should try to clarify what this distinction
between adult and child readers consists in outside/inside the book covers.

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2
Children and Adults

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Perhaps the Harry Potter phenomenon, the enormous success of the
books, is not a matter of book covers and things outside readers and
texts; perhaps the phenomenon is one to do squarely with texts and
readers. Perhaps the books are so successful because they have received
extraordinary approbation from the readers they were primarily and
ostensibly directed at – children. Everything is clear and above board
then: the success of the Harry Potter books proves that they are genuine
articles, books that are really for children, that children actually enjoy.
The scale of success might indicate that these are more genuinely books
for children than other books that are produced as such. Perhaps the
whole Harry Potter phenomenon devolves from a perfect match between
text and intended readership, and this has to do with the books being
for children and being read with pleasure by children. There is nothing
more complicated about the phenomenon, everything else follows
logically from that. This is the view that is unsurprisingly championed
in a feature in the Advertising Age:

The popularity of Harry Potter emerged with the schoolyard chatter,

not with marketing hype. Today, two-third of kids ages 8 to 18 have
read at least one in author J.K. Rowling’s series of Potter books –
properties that initially arrived with comparatively little of the fanfare
we’ve come to associate with new book titles.
A generation that has been marketed to its entire life birthed its
own buzz, took ownership of the Potter brand and declared it genuine.
Until now, virtually everything marketed to kids has been saturated
by hype, and they’re hyped out. Harry grew organically, and it is the
purity of these origins that has created real equity for the brand. 1

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 Children and Adults 9

Perhaps I was misguided in dwelling upon images on book covers.

If this is true, then the Harry Potter books are worth examining for one
special reason: they should give, more than any other recent book,
adults some indication of that magical thing – the kind of textual qualities
that grab children. What is that factor X that gets Harry Potter books an
extraordinary endorsement from children?

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But before following that line of argument any further, we need to
draw back a bit. That Harry Potter books exist with adult covers is not
purely a matter of wishful thinking. Adults (above 18, even above 35)
have taken to Harry Potter books with extraordinary enthusiasm too.
This is familiar territory now. When the New York Times Book Review
created a separate children’s fiction best seller list in August 2000 and
relegated the Harry Potter books to the top of it (these had held the
top three slots of the adult fiction best seller list for more than a year
before that) Barbara Marcus, President of the Scholastic Children’s
Book Group, noted bitterly that 30 per cent of the first three in the
series had been bought by and for readers who were 35 or older.2
On the same occasion, Craig Virden, president of the Random House
Children’s Books, reportedly said: ‘3.8 million copies: that’s an adult
number! And even though I think anything that draws attention to
children’s books is great for business, I have to say that this is really
unfair to Scholastic.’3 The figure quoted by Barbara Marcus originated
from the NPD Group, which conducts market research for 12,000
households in the US. The NPD Group has in fact been producing an
interesting range of statistics since on the readership of the Harry Potter
books, and on interest in the films, and consumption of Harry Potter
memorabilia (published in NPD’s Harry Potter Prophet), all of which
indicate a high degree of interest in these at all sorts of levels among
adults. Irrespective of actual readership, adult interest in, contribution
to and engagement with the Harry Potter phenomenon has certainly
been substantial, judging from a cursory glance at figures such as those
gleaned from surveys and shown in the tables overleaf. 4
Another survey carried out in May 2001 (announced by NPD on
26 June 2001) showed that of the 1,373 respondents, 57 per cent of
children and 47 per cent of adults were planning to buy Harry Potter
products; and of the adults 32 per cent admitted that they were buying
some of these for themselves. And, finally, a survey carried out in
May 2002 in the UK showed that despite the Harry Potter books, seven
to fourteen year olds were buying fewer books than before; and for the
Harry Potter books themselves the ratio of adults reading them com-
pared to children is increasing (whereas in 1999 71 per cent of these

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10 Re-Reading Harry Potter

Table 1 The Harry Potter popularity meter survey, in which 1,511 respondents
aligned themselves to one of the positions in the left column

Children (6–17) Adults

per cent per cent

Harry Potter is the best 17 3

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I really like Harry Potter 21 8
I like Harry Potter 23 16
I don’t care for Harry Potter 28 66
I don’t like Harry Potter 5 1
I really don’t like Harry Potter 2 3
I can’t stand Harry Potter 4 3

Source: NPD, 28 March 2001.

(If taking a position – i.e. not not caring – indicates some effort to read or think about Harry
Potter books, then this shows that at least 34 per cent of the adult respondents had done this.)

Table 2 Kids and adults who are aware of and plan to see the film Harry Potter
and the Sorcerer’s Stone, from 1,403 respondents in July 2001

Kids (6–17) Kids that read Adults Adults that read

per cent Harry Potter per cent Harry Potter
per cent per cent

Aware of movie 65 75 50 86
Plan to see movie 47 66 21 75
Not sure 29 25 25 13

Source: NPD, 26 September 2001.

(Survey results on this for September 2001, announced on 8 November 2001, showed that
awareness of the movie had increased for kids in general to 75 per cent, and kids who read
Harry Potter to 88 per cent, and for adults in general to 65 per cent, and adults who read
Harry Potter to 93 per cent.)

were bought for 7 to 14 year olds, by 2001 this had fallen to 36 per cent
with 15 to 35 year olds accounting for most of the remaining).5
Even insofar as children are primarily the readers of certain books,
it is generally accepted that adults have a substantial mediating role in
that interest (the above figures certainly indicate that adult mediation
has been an important element in making Harry Potter books popular
among children). Adults buy books for children, encourage children to
read those books, sometimes read those books to children; children buy
books written ultimately largely by adults, published and marketed by
adults, following often the example and enthusiasm of adults. It is very

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 Children and Adults 11

difficult indeed to gauge to what extent the Harry Potter books engage
children in any unique fashion, untouched by adult interests and
motives. The collections of children’s responses to the Harry Potter
books that are available6 express little apart from enthusiasm and the
ubiquity of these sorts of adult mediation. The enormous sales figures
of these books in a range of different cultural contexts cannot be said to

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reflect as clearly the endorsement of children as the fact that adults
are buying them in large quantities ostensibly for children (mostly
adults buy books): these sales figures indicate that adults have given
extraordinary sanction to these books as appropriate reading matter ostensibly
for children. If there’s a factor X involved, it is surely not one that relates
to extraordinary endorsement from children, but one that explains the
extraordinary sanction from adults for children; the clarification of that
factor X lies within the adult readings of Harry Potter books, not the
children’s reading.
But the issue here is more complex. The market research indicates
(doesn’t prove, for ultimately those figures depend on the quirks of
sample surveys and questionnaires) that adults are reading and
endorsing these Harry Potter books not just for or on behalf of children,
but for themselves. A large number of ecstatic reviews have attested to
the pleasure that adults have derived from reading these books: 7
though this is often justified by such sentimental and ultimately
meaningless notions as making up for a lost childhood or rediscover-
ing the child in oneself. Those reviewers who are not able to derive
such pleasure themselves recognize instinctively that they have to
argue with adults, not children, for adults are the main consumers and
endorsers here. Some are simply bewildered by the phenomenon of
this extraordinary adult endorsement and wonder why it has
occurred, others direct their arguments against Harry Potter to adults
and for adults. It has even been suggested that the extent of adult
interest in Harry Potter books shows a gradual regression in reading
habits among adults (adults are becoming less ‘grown-up’ in their
reading habits). 8
It is, it seems to me, impossible to tease out, verify and analyse what
exactly children are reading in the Harry Potter books. It is possible to
affirm that significant numbers of children have unravelled the words
and sentences and chapters in a basic mechanistic manner: as a mode
of storing up information (enough to answer Potter trivia quizzes or
play Potter board and card and computer games), as a part of learning
to read and acquiring some grasp of language (something adults are
grateful for amidst fears about literacy which have simmered constantly

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12 Re-Reading Harry Potter

since the 1960s)9 or to chime in with or disagree with adult or peer

suggestion (to answer those perennial questions, ‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Was it fun?’ ‘Why did you like it?’). These indicate that the pleasure
and benefit that children have derived from engaging with the Harry
Potter books are to a determinable extent outside the text, so to say – it is
the pleasure of competing in games intelligently, or the benefit of

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learning to read fluently, or the joy of impressing an adult or a peer.
Undeniably, children do get pleasure from their reading (I, and many
adults, will attest to having experienced such pleasure, but that’s an
adult memory of something that is not recoverable as such and only
analysable in retrospect) – my point is that that aspect of children’s
reading is irretrievable in any unmediated sense. Any retrieval is a
critical act of adult reconstruction. The fact is that adults have perfectly
naturally and in accordance with custom spoken for children insofar as
the Harry Potter books go, inferred their pleasure for them and discerned
the moral (or immoral) lessons for them – and in the process it is not
unreasonable to assume that adults have spoken for themselves. Large
numbers of adults have done so withut the subterfuge of speaking on
behalf of children.
For critical purposes it is prudent to assume that there is no factor X
that we can hope to reveal that would tell us anything about children
from the Harry Potter phenomenon. Let me be clear about this. I am not
asserting that large numbers of children are not getting pleasure in reading
Harry Potter books, or are not enchanted by and ‘hooked onto’ them. It
seems very likely, judging from asseverations from children and adults
alike, that they are. What I am saying is that that pleasure or enchantment
is not analysable in terms of the relationship between text and reader;
insofar as verifiable evidence allows for analysis of what children read at
all it either takes us out of the sphere of the text and reader as a closed
relationship (to the world of proliferation in media, learning and com-
petitive activities and entertainments and the industry that capitalizes
on these, or response to stimuli provided by educational institutions
and interests), or rebounds into adults speaking on behalf of children
and thereby actually saying something about themselves or something
about the world that adults (more determinatively than children) self-
consciously inhabit.
Let me call my stance here what it is: it is a prudent critical decision not
to examine the Harry Potter phenomenon as something that peculiarly
devolves or emanates from and with effect on children. I think that can only
be asserted and not examined beyond the assertion. As far as this study is
concerned the Harry Potter books, and the phenomenon, are addressed because

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 Children and Adults 13

it is likely to tell us (adults mostly, especially the readers of this essay itself)
something about us and the social and political world we inhabit. If children
as a category, as a collection of subjects, enter this world in any analysable
sense it is most likely to be on adult terms as a category or collection of
subjectivities with social and political effect.

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3
The Seriousness of Social
and Political Effects

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When I asserted that in talking about ‘children’ as readers of the Harry
Potter books (actually any book) we – primarily adults – are presenting
‘children’ as ‘a category or collection of subjectivities with social and
political effect’, I am aware that I have stepped into the, in this context
frowned-upon, register of the serious. I have done this already by stating
earlier (with what was, I hope, a tantalizing lack of explanation) that
the main interest of this essay is the ‘political and social effects that
constitute the Harry Potter phenomenon’. Such statements could all too
easily become fodder for negative perceptions of academic jargonizing,
the pretentiously intellectual, the nit-pickingly pedantic . . . – all terms
replete with a sense of the mismatch between object and analysis. This
perception could take two forms. It could be observed that the Harry
Potter books are aesthetically too slight, too much the sphere of light
reading, too attuned to an uncritical child world, too removed from the
here and the now in their content to deserve such hefty critical apparatus
as political and social analysis. Or it could be asserted that there is
something perverse about trying to expose the delight of (especially
children, but also children-within-adults) reading Harry Potter books to
these worldly and responsible matters: there is something pristine and
innocent about these books and the enthusiasm they generate which
should be admired and valued, not exposed to weighty scrutiny. A mis-
match is gestured towards in such arguments: the mismatch of meeting
the light-hearted with killjoy seriousness, the unthinking with analytical
rigour, the obviously trivial with the expectation of depth, the mass-
market product with elite literary taste.
If I took such arguments seriously I would have nothing to write here.
Both the assertion that the Harry Potter books do not deserve analytical
attention and the desire to maintain the innocent joy of reading them

14

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 The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects 15

are indicative of something that itself needs serious consideration: both are
indicative of a determination not to realize the possibilities of reading
beyond a point, not to read thinkingly. (I briefly elucidate the connotations
of reading thinkingly in the next chapter.) These do not confirm that the
Harry Potter books cannot or should not be placed in the happening
material world; these do confirm that there is a widespread determination

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to keep these books away from all that. The embarrassed grin and
excuses with which a serious academic who happens not to be a specialist
in children’s literature or fantasy writing admits to reading these books
(almost like admitting to reading pornographic magazines), and the
supercilious surprise and condescension with which his serious col-
leagues greet this information,1 establish the extent to which that blind-
spot affects the scope of their visions. The outrage with which a parent
grateful to the Harry Potter books for engaging their children greets an
analytical (especially when not approbatory) remark about these books 2
also reveals the effects of that blind-spot.
A widely prevalent determination to keep something outside the
sphere of social and political analysis is worrying for at least two reasons:
(a) it makes one suspect that social and political implications are
involved that are somehow embarrassing; and (b) it erects walls around
human curiosity and reasoning (just as dogmatism, prejudice or ignor-
ance do).
I know that my more erudite readers (who know their genres, and
understand ‘great’ literature, and have touched their touchstones, and
have interrogated the canon) would not be impressed by the above
glibly generalizing statements. Out of respect for them particularly, but
really also as a matter of interest and curiosity, I feel I should indicate
after all why the Harry Potter books are particularly deserving of serious
social and political analysis. There are three by now well-known obser-
vations about these books, or rather the Harry Potter phenomenon, that
are worth noting here:

1 The Harry Potter books are economically the most successful of all
literary books published in recent years. This hardly needs elaboration,
but closer attention to the scale of this success is instructive. The
Harry Potter books have engendered an economic phenomenon in
publishing and related industries that is by all standards extraordinary;
it is seldom that anything in the broad field of literature becomes so
inextricably linked in such a short time to the discourses of market
and finance. In March 2002 it was estimated that the Harry Potter
books have had world-wide book sales of almost 140 million copies.

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16 Re-Reading Harry Potter

In the UK and the US, Goblet alone had an all-time record first print-run
of 5.3 million copies, which were bought out so rapidly that second
print-runs had to be ordered within a few days. Publisher’s Weekly
surveys of best seller lists across the world have shown that in 2001
the Harry Potter books (all four available at the time) were the
number one international best sellers; and that all four of them were

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among the first twenty most sold children’s books ever in the United
States (among these Goblet, 2000, was fifth where the first four – J.S.
Lowry’s Poly Little Puppy [1942], Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit [1902],
Gertrude Crampton’s Tootle [1945], and Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and
Ham [1960] – had substantial time advantages in achieving their
positions).3 Not unnaturally this has made J.K. Rowling a very rich
person: on 7 April 2002 Reuters reported that she had become the
147th richest person in the UK, with a personal wealth estimated at
£226 million (well ahead of the pop-star Madonna, whose wealth was
estimated at £200 million).4 The effect of this on the UK publishers of
the Harry Potter books, Bloomsbury, has been most satisfactory.
Bloomsbury shares, The Financial Times reported on 9 March 2002,5
which were below 100p in 1998 hit a peak of 972p in October 2001.
Over two years to 1 March 2002 Bloomsbury had outperformed the
FTSE All-Share Index by 380 per cent; pre-tax profits had grown
from £1.58 million in 1998 to £5.46 million in 2000 and then to
£8.75 million in 2001.6 Of these figures, it is estimated that the Harry
Potter books generated about half of the publisher’s total turnover
and an even greater percentage of profits.7 The Financial Times piece
also gave some details of the expansion of Bloomsbury activities in
this buoyant position: they acquired the publishing company A & C
Black which is best known for producing the Who’s Who books;
made an alliance with the Creative Artists Agency, aimed at getting
more books into film; and agreed a business database deal with the
Economist. The US publisher, Scholastic Children’s Publishing Group’s
profits in fiscal year ending 1 May 2001 showed a 27.2 per cent leap
over fiscal year 2000, with US$190 million being generated from the
Harry Potter titles.8 But it wasn’t just the publishing industry which
benefited from the Midas touch of these; the screen adaptation of
Stone was a phenomenal success too: in February 2002 it was reported
that it had become the second highest grossing film in history at
US$926.1 million around the world, of which US$320 million came
from the box office sales in US alone (the highest grossing film of all
time at that point was The Titanic at US$1.8 billion globally).9 But this
phenomenon doesn’t stop there either. The Stone film sound-track

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 The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects 17

by John Williams became in February 2002 the eighth top-selling

‘classical album’ in the UK.10 Numerous Harry Potter-related products
industries found their share prices and profit margins boosted by the
association: an audio-recording of Goblet by the actor and writer
Stephen Fry attracted £1.8 million worth of advance bookings in the
UK alone in April 2001;11 in January 2002 Electronic Arts reported

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that it had earnings at US$1.03/share, whereas analysts had expected
the company to report earnings at 89c/share, largely due to the
strong sales of games related to the Harry Potter movie;12 Mattel’s
Harry Potter Trivia Game, Mystery at Hogwarts and Quidditch Card
Game showed satisfactory sales figures;13 in March 2002 the computer
games developer Argonaut reported stock rise by 8 per cent due to
sales of hit products such as the Harry Potter game.14 Charities tried
to capitalize on the Harry Potter phenomenon: J.K. Rowling made
something of a reputation for herself as an altruistic person after she
gave £500,000 to the National Council for One-Parent Families
(NCOPF) in October 2000 and made donations to cancer charities in
December 2000;15 in January 2001 it was reported that the comic
writer Richard Curtis had persuaded Rowling to write two books
which could have been found in the fictional Hogwarts Library, and
was hoping to get £22 million for Comic Relief by selling 11 million
copies of these.16 Auction houses got in on the act too: in November
2000 it was reported that one of the 300 hard-back first editions of
Stone had sold for over £6,000 in an auction in Wiltshire; and in
February 2002 newspapers announced that a first edition of Stone had
sold for £9,700 in London, and that a set of signed deluxe editions
had fetched £3,000 for the Leukaemia Research Fund Charity.17 This
success story keeps going on but I don’t think the point needs to be
laboured here any further. Indeed, so inextricably entwined has the
Harry Potter phenomenon become with market and financial issues
that some of the more serious examinations of the Harry Potter texts
have been undertaken from disciplinary perspectives that deal with
those issues18 (I discuss these later).
2 The Harry Potter books and their offspring have apparently transcended
cultural boundaries more effortlessly than any other fictional work
of recent years. By March 2002 it was reported that these have been
translated into 47 languages and had sold well in most of the coun-
tries where available; 57 publishers covering different countries are
involved. The second and third international best-sellers listed in
March 2002 by Publisher’s Weekly were significantly behind in the
range of languages that they had been translated into: in the second

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18 Re-Reading Harry Potter

spot, John Grisham’s The Brethren was at that time available in

29 languages, and in the third spot Umberto Eco’s Baudolino in
32 languages.19 The extraordinary sales in the US and the UK were
accompanied by similarly healthy figures in most other European
countries, and newspaper reports indicated that the phenomenon
had extended to a range of countries in other continents. The film of

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Stone was also a substantial hit in each of these countries, as the status
of being the second highest grossing film ever world-wide indicates.
A November 2002 survey of the reception of the Harry Potter books
and films in Germany, Japan, France, Indonesia, China, Spain,
Australia, India, Mexico and Norway gives some indication of the
success of both in all these contexts.20 Giving more figures here
would be tedious.
3 The Harry Potter books are the most challenged (i.e. where com-
plaints are recorded by an institution about the appropriateness of
the content of a book) and banned books of our time. According
to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom
the Harry Potter books headed the top of their most challenged books
list for three years running (from 1999 to 2001).21 In 1999 itself it
reached the top of that list in the US with 26 challenges to remove
them from the shelves of libraries in 16 states – no mean achievement
for a series the first of which was published in 1997. By 2000 it was
placed among the top 100 most challenged books of the 1990s.
In January 2001 it was reported that the number of complaints
against the Harry Potter books in the US had tripled since 1999.22
In 29 March 2000 Rev. George Bender of the Harvest Assembly of
God Church in Pennsylvania led a ceremonial burning of pop items
that were considered ‘ungodly’, including a Harry Potter book;23 and in
30 December 2001 Rev. John Brock of the Christ Community Church
of Alamogordo, New Mexico, led a book-burning service in which
the Harry Potter and other books were thrown into the flames.24
In March 2000 in the US eight groups including the American
Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Freedom to Read
Foundation, the Association of American Publishers, the National
Council of Teachers in English, the Children’s Book Council, the
Association of Booksellers for Children, the National Coalition
Against Censorship, and PEN American Center formed a national
association – initially called Muggles for Harry Potter and later
renamed Kidspeak – to fight attempts to restrict access to the Harry
Potter books. Their web-site (‘http://www.mugglesforharrypotter.com’)
continues to provide information about the bannings of and complaints

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 The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects 19

against the Harry Potter books in the US. In November 2001 the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement regarding
the Stone film: ‘Parents concerned about the film’s sorcery element
should know that it is unlikely to pose any threat to Catholic beliefs.
Harry Potter is so obviously innocuous fantasy that its fiction is easily
distinguishable from life.’25 Attempted and implemented censorship

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of the above sort was also reported from several other countries:
including the UK (St. Mary’s School in Chatham, Kent), Australia
(The Christian Outreach College in Queensland and about 60 Sev-
enth Day Adventist schools), Canada (The Durham Region School
Board and others), Germany (schools in the Muensingen-Reitheim
district), the United Arab Emirates (all private schools) and Taiwan
(the Ling-Leung Church).26 There are probably other similar instances
of denunciation and censorship that I haven’t picked up. The above-
mentioned cases are all at the instance of the religious right (primarily
the Christian right), and are straightforwardly matters of attempted
or implemented censorship. The phenomenon of censorship with
regard to the Harry Potter books may therefore be regarded as a mat-
ter of religious bigotry and of little interest from an analytical critical
perspective. It could be argued, and justifiably, that such bigotry is
by definition outside the sphere of rationalistic discussion: banning
is indicative of a desire not to engage with oppositional perspectives.
There are several reasons for being cautious about such a dismissive
attitude however. One, religious censorship on the scale that the
Harry Potter books have attracted is undoubtedly a matter of critical
interest for those who are interested in the reception of books, and
responsive engagements with texts, as social phenomena. Such cases
might not tell us much about the texts as such but they do reveal
a good deal about the religious attitudes that attach to literature and
direct much reading. As a symptom of religious bigotry in our world
these cases are worthy of examination, and after 11 September 2001
it is transparent even in critical circles in the West that any careless
and inattentive dismissal of religious bigotry, whatever the source and
wherever, is unacceptable. Two, though it seems obvious that such
a desire for making the oppositional disappear can only emanate
from an uncritical perspective, there is some evidence that religious
perspectives of Harry Potter haven’t been entirely without the support
of analysis and scholarship. Several studies questioning the ideological
appropriateness of these books from Christian religious perspectives
have appeared, including several substantial and reasonably well-
researched books.27 Three, these cases are not just about religious

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20 Re-Reading Harry Potter

bigotry, but especially about the location of children and the educa-
tion of children (most of them have to do with schools and other
educational institutions, and the case for censorship has generally
been argued for in terms of protecting children) – these are, in other
words, revealing of the positioning of children as a category with
social and political effect within religious discourses. Four, though

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religious perspectives provide the most obvious instances of disappro-
bation (all too easily falling in with calls for censorship), there sim-
mers behind this a larger polarization of essentially unthinking
opinion about the Harry Potter books which is not unconnected with
the phenomenon of attempting to censor. Just as these books have
attracted a phenomenal amount of enthusiastic approval (much of
which is, I have maintained above, unthinking), these books have also
fuelled a noticeable quantity of (often equally unthinking) disapproval.
The kind of unthinking approval that the Harry Potter books have
drawn has been commented on already by some critics – especially
Jack Zipes and Christine Schoefer – who have expressed scepticism
about certain aspects of these books and found themselves beset by
outraged adults.28 What is yet to be examined and analysed is the
kind of unthinking disapproval that is also being directed at these
books and not just from the Christian right. The NPD Harry Potter
popularity meter survey table given in Chapter 2 shows a more or
less balanced ratio of opinions between two extreme positions:
‘Harry Potter is the best’ and ‘I can’t stand Harry Potter’. These
extreme positions smell of unthinking sloganizing, of the chanting
of a cheering crowd or a lynch mob. What is noteworthy is both the
blind approval and the blind disapproval – the polarized opinions,
despite the indifferent middle ground (those who don’t care). In
December 2001 it was reported that a Harry Potter ‘hate-line’ has
been established in Austria, a telephone service called the Anti-
Harry Potter Hotline, where those who wished could ring up and
rant about exactly what the title suggests.29 A trawl through web-
sites devoted to the Harry Potter phenomenon throws up several that
define themselves as anti-Harry Potter – notably, for example, that
of The Organization of People Against Potter (TOOPAP), ‘http://
www.geocities.com/toopap/’. Though these are dominated by con-
servative Christian opinions, they are not entirely monopolized by
them.

These three points gesture towards the substantial social and political
effect of the Harry Potter books, and circumscribe the so-called Harry Potter

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 The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects 21

phenomenon. The manner in which the discourses of finance and markets

mediate and moderate (immoderately in this case) the passage of books
to readers, such that the reader’s engagement rebounds back into financial
and market discourses; the extent to which books get absorbed and
accommodated in different cultures (drawing upon translated assumptions
and cross-cultural perceptions); the extent to which different ideological

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positions seek to negate or silence oppositional perspectives, or (more
importantly) construct certain subjects and objects in their own terms –
all these are clearly matters of social and political concern. The picture
that these observations gesture towards is undoubtedly a complex one
(more complex than my schematic presentation of these has suggested)
for there are probably significant links between the three points. The
operations of markets and financial interests cannot be seen in isolation
from their cross-cultural or international effects: in a vaunted age of
globalization – a term that particularly applies to modes of economic
organization – cross-cultural or international transmissions are determined
to a large degree by such organization. The kind of unthinking enthusi-
asm and revulsion that was marked in point 3 above (whatever the ideo-
logical source thereof) may well have something to do with marketing
and financial interests: with the manner in which books are advertised
and promoted, and the manner in which consumers are acted upon
and consuming desires created. The strength of religious opinion-
forming and dogmatism in our world that is displayed in point 3 above
also impinges upon prevailing understandings of the cultural locations
from which they emanate. The fact that the Harry Potter books have
been a focal point for religious denunciation in recent years may well
be symptomatic of the larger growth of such ideologies in our world,
which in turn could be regarded as a reaction to what passes for global-
ization. (This has been suggested in a plethora of political and sociological
works.) There are, in other words, a set of fascinating questions of social
and political import – a sense of underlying socially and politically
effective patterns – that could, to say the least, be approached through
a close examination of the Harry Potter phenomenon.
There are, it seems to me, two ways of approaching the task of eluci-
dating such issues. One way, which may be regarded as a world-to-text
approach, could be to address these patterns and questions at the level
at which they are most ostensibly posed: to delineate them from the
midst of an informed understanding of processes of globalization,
financial and market discourses, religious and other ideologies, specific
cultural formations and cross-cultural perspectives (with the underlying
linguistic and political presumptions), and the linkages between these.

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22 Re-Reading Harry Potter

Two (I think of this as a text-to-world approach) follows from a conviction

that one factor that connects all these social and political effects are
obviously the Harry Potter books themselves, and close attention to
these in the first instance is likely to provide some indication of how
the effects in question emanate from them. The first (world-to-text)
approach has a broad aim: of examining how the condition of the world

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explains certain phenomena (in this instance the Harry Potter phenomenon
could be regarded as one symptom of this condition among many). Methodo-
logically, this demands a primary understanding of the condition of the
world in a broad sense. The contents of texts and their possible readings
do not figure as being determinative in this approach; indeed these are
more likely to be seen as being determined by extrinsic forces. The
second (text-to-world) approach has a more specific objective: to under-
stand how specific texts and their readings lead outwards towards and devolve
from the world they occur within. Methodologically, this demands a pri-
mary focus on specific texts and how they may be read. It is more or less
assumed in such an approach that the content of texts and their possible
readings have something to do with their social and political effects,
and indicate something of the social and political circumstances they
derive from.
Ideally, of course, it may be hoped that some sort of balance is struck
between both these approaches so that the world-to-text and the text-
to-world directions converge at some point of lucid apprehension. The
realization of this ideal critical situation is, it may be argued, often
impeded by the contrary critical presumptions that underlie these two
approaches. But I do not wish to go into that here. It is not my intention
to examine the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two
approaches at a theoretical level: I have simply outlined them briefly to
enable a clear statement of my methodological prerogatives. An enormous
amount of literary critical theory (arguably all literary critical theory)
has revolved around this question. Let me simply say that I feel that
both approaches are equally, albeit in different ways, valuable; and
instead of trying to reconcile them, or choosing between them on
reasoned grounds, or using both, for the sake of methodological clarity
I more or less arbitrarily plunge for one of them in this study. Briefly
then, in this study I choose to approach the Harry Potter phenomenon with
a text-to-world methodology.
My essential questions are these: How are the considerable social and
political effects of the Harry Potter books related to the content and
possible readings of those books? To what extent could the latter be
thought of as determining the former? What are the reasons that these

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 The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects 23

particular texts and their possible readings have generated such effects,
where many texts that are apparently similar to these in different ways,
and subjected to similar market forces and ideological conditions, have
not been able to do so?
These are serious matters and need to be treated as such.

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4
Text-to-World Assumptions
(Some General Definitions)

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It may be useful at this point to recapitulate the critical decisions that
I have taken so far, and to make explicit the connected questions that
remain unanswered. There are three such critical decisions; the questions
that arise from them are stated in italics:

(a) I have stated in Chapter 1 that this essay is devoted to examining

the social and political effects of the Harry Potter books. In stating
this I haven’t yet explained precisely what I mean by social and political
effects. That is what this chapter is devoted to.
(b) In Chapter 2 I have decided that this study would not try to analyse
the Harry Potter books as being directed essentially towards or being
consumed essentially by children. For critical purposes the books
will be addressed here as any book directed at a fully critically
aware and discerning audience normally is. It might be felt that this
decision needs further fleshing out and, in fact, I revisit the ground
underlying this decision at some length in Chapter 7 below.
(c) At the end of the previous chapter I have explained that I will
adopt a text-to-world approach and methodology for this essay –
with a view to a serious analysis of the books in question. Such an
approach to the Harry Potter books would, I have tacitly assumed,
counter the unthinking trend that much of the response to these
has manifested so far. However, I haven’t yet clearly stated what makes
an unthinking or misguided reading so, and what may characterize a ser-
ious thinking reading. And, in that connection, I also have not clarified
what links serious thinking readings to an understanding of social and
political effects – why I expect to be able to move from text-to-world if
I approach the text in a serious thinking fashion. Is it not possible that in
this case the content and readerly possibilities of the texts are such that

24

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 Text-to-World Assumptions 25

they simply refuse our world1 and location within our world? Much of
the remainder of this part is devoted to clearing up these issues.

The questions that remain are difficult ones, and yet it is necessary that
for a rigorous and consistent consideration of the Harry Potter texts and
phenomenon they should be answered. I can’t help feeling that I have

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placed myself in a rather uncomfortable corner. When in doubt look for
authorities has been the motto of my not unusual education; I am
tempted to discharge a powerful stream of authoritative references at
this point to wash away (or drown) any annoying scepticism about my
position here. However, I am determined to resist this temptation. I do
wish to be able to convey my arguments to readers who may be seriously
interested in these matters but not necessarily expert in literary critical
theories. Most importantly, I do not want to stray too far from my focus
on the Harry Potter phenomenon – and this study is already in danger of
turning into some sort of semi-philosophical musing with the Harry Potter
books as an excuse. That will not do. So I proceed to some brief and
to-the-point generalizations about political and social effects and different
kinds of reading, unsupported by references to the numerous relevant
works of literary theory, and open therefore to the interrogation of
sceptics. Here we go then:

• As far as this essay goes, the social and the political are with regard to
a collective, members of which understand that they are within that
collective – a society or polity. Society refers to the constitution of
a collective (with modes of subsistence, cultural forms, informal
organizational structures, etc.); polity refers to the rules and values
with which a collective is administered and conducted (with the aid
of legal procedures, constitutions, executive and regulatory institu-
tions, official organizational structures, etc.). Clearly, these terms are
not independent: the same collective could be regarded as both
a society and a polity; a society may have different polities within it;
a polity may have a range of societies within it; societies and polities
may overlap and yet be distinguished through a complex set of
relations. Further, social matters would inevitably impinge on the
functioning of a polity and political matters on that of a society.
Social issues may comprehend issues that pertain to a significant part
of a society or to a range of societies; just as political issues could per-
tain to some significant section of a polity or to a range of different
polities. Some idea, event or phenomenon can be said to have social
effect when it generates some form of activity or thinking that could

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26 Re-Reading Harry Potter

be said to impact upon or have implications for, loosely, a society or

a range of societies in general; and similarly political effect can be
understood in terms of a polity or range of polities. 2
• Every individual, group, institution, etc. is necessarily part of at least
a society and a polity, and sometimes of several societies and polities.
Every act of interpersonal or institutional or communal (or any other

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kind) expression and exchange (whether in daily life, through insti-
tutional forums, through the media, or through texts of any sort) is
therefore determined to a significant extent by the social and political
mores of the communicators–communicatees involved in compli-
cated ways.
• Acts of communication do not necessarily have equal degrees of
social and political effect: significant degrees of social and political
effect would be such as would impact upon or have implications for
significant quantities within/of collectives. Whether certain social and
political effects could be regarded as significant or not is determined
by the conventions surrounding the usage of such terms, or by what
may be regarded as reasonable quantification of impact or implications
entailed. Significant social and political effects are therefore either
manifest and understood to be manifest among interested parties; or
they have to be demonstrated as occurring by interested parties.
• Every text, of whatever kind, could be regarded as representing an
act of communication, and therefore falling within a field (or more)
of social and political mores, and possibly able to produce some
degree of social and political effect. Since this essay is concerned
with works of literary fiction, that is what I focus on. A work of liter-
ary fiction could be regarded as mediating communication between
an author and readers,3 between different readers, between different
chronological and cultural locations, between different groups (say,
reading and discussion groups devoted to particular kinds of texts),
even within a reader (as in a reader thinking about a text, so to say,
with herself), between different institutions (between say schools
and publishers and the media, etc.), between different texts that
already exist (in inevitably being associated with ideas, images,
methods which occur elsewhere), and so on. At which of these levels
a work of literary fiction is understood as mediating communication
depends to a great degree on which level one chooses to focus (each
of these has been discussed somewhere or the other). However, at
each of these levels some kind of social and political relevance, some
reflection of social and political mores, and some degree of social
and political effect could be anticipated.

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 Text-to-World Assumptions 27

• Insofar as a work of literary fiction could be said to exercise a social

or political effect on readers who belong to some society and polity
(which all works of literary fiction could do to some extent), there
are degrees to which readers may be involved in that process. Readers
may passively or unthinkingly (similar to subconsciously, but without
the psychoanalytical baggage that comes with that term) become

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participant in the exercising of the social and political effect; readers
may be wilfully or unconsideringly indifferent to such social and
political effects (which means that though such effects may be gener-
ated these readers have either chosen not to or happen not to be
affected by them); readers may analyse and interrogate in an aware
fashion what social and political implications and effects a work of
literary fiction is generating and then situate themselves with regard
to it. The first possibility I have called unthinking reading; the middle
possibility is of no interest here; the final possibility has been thought
of as thinking or analytical reading.
• It is generally recognized that a work of literary fiction does have
some sort of social and political effect. What the degree of signifi-
cance of such an effect is can be self-evident to all or discerned and
understood through a thinking or analytical reading. Why a certain
degree of such effect occurs can only be examined through readings
that are thinking and analytical. Unthinking readings become part
and parcel of that effect; unthinking participants in that effect; part
of the modus operandi of that effect – their role is indistinguishable
from that of the text in mediating the act of communication that
leads to the social and political effect. The social and political impli-
cations of a work of literary fiction and the manner in which these
impinge upon unthinking reading (which together forms the social
and political effect) is what the analytical or thinking readings try to
unravel and clarify. That, at any rate, is the key conviction of the
text-to-world methodology that I have assumed here.
• Put in that fashion it might instinctively seem that analytical or
unthinking readings are essentially what literary critics do or what
literary interpretation does. To assume that there are hidden or
non-explicit – but present and in some sense true – meanings and
implications in works of literary fiction (any literary work), and to
try and reveal them, seem to be what the institutionalized practice of
literary study does. I am however not convinced that literary criticism
or interpretation is necessarily the same as analytical and thinking
reading. The former is primarily defined by the institutionalization
of its practice, by the fact that those who engage with it have some

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28 Re-Reading Harry Potter

sort of institutional sanction and follow some sort of institutionally

or communally agreed upon form. It is conceivable that analytical
and thinking reading may occur outside those sanctions and forms.
Let me put the situation as follows: analytical and thinking reading
is likely to be close to literary criticism or interpretation (the institu-
tional prerogatives are designed to encourage analysis and thought);

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but is not necessarily so. Literary criticism or interpretation may also
be weak in analysis and thinkingness, may be constructed on ques-
tionable premises, may have contradictory or limited methodologies
that dilute its analytical qualities. Such criticism or interpretation
would be unthinking too, and therefore become unthinkingly partici-
pant in the social and political effect in question (thus transferring
the institutional credentials to that effect, making it that much
stronger). This, I argue soon, has actually been the case with regard
to the Harry Potter books.

These, then, are clarifications of some of the terms I have used demon-
stratively so far.

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5
A Thought about Open and
Closed Texts

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What sort of bearing the above definitions may have on a serious
text-to-world reading of the Harry Potter books would naturally depend
to some extent on the sort of presumptions that exist about the rela-
tionship of such books to readers before they are thinkingly read (an area
that is connected to the book covers with which I began). This involves,
in fact, the categorization of books vis-à-vis readers in a general sense:
i.e. not in terms of descriptive (or broadly genre-based) categories
according to form (fiction, drama, poetry), content (fantasy fiction, science
fiction), authorship (women’s writing, black writing), or type of reader
(children’s fiction); but categorization in terms of the quality of general
reading experience that is offered (such as popular writing, pulp fiction,
literary fiction, pot boiler, easy reading). I discuss the genre-based cat-
egorization or descriptive categorization at some length below; those can
only be proffered, understood and accepted after some sort of thinking
reading. Categories in terms of quality of general reading experience on
offer do not lend themselves to discussion easily: they are somewhat
arbitrary and off-the-cuff, and are usually designedly made unthinkingly
for marketing purposes. If such categories are approached in a more
analytical spirit, they can be dissected further only in descriptive terms or
more analytically oriented generic terms – and then they lose their sense
of being categories according to quality of general reading experience.
For such categories to work they have to remain arbitrary, off-the-cuff,
unthinking. Given that these are unanalysably such, however, these
categories do undeniably play a determinative role in readers’ attitudes
and responses. The Harry Potter books are largely regarded as ‘easy reading’
or ‘popular literature’ (at any rate, no one would protest if I said that).
That is, let’s say, their category according to the quality of general reading
experience. This has a clear effect on how they are regarded, responded

29

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30 Re-Reading Harry Potter

to, and what sort of political and social effects may be attributed or may
fail to get attributed to them. If I try to delve deeper into understanding
why such a categorization attaches to the Harry Potter books, however,
I will not be making the categorization clearer, but would be moving
away to a somewhat different mode of categorization that is more amen-
able to critical thinking. I will have to start wondering (and indeed

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I soon do so) whether it has to do with the fantastic content, with being
directed at children, with being written by a woman, with its linguistic
form, etc. In doing so the category according to quality of general read-
ing experience would have slipped out of my grasp, and I would be left
talking about genre or descriptive categories. Given my commitment to
serious, thinking, analytical reading there isn’t much I can do about
this, except: (a) recognize that there are such categories according to
quality of general reading experience; (b) admit that these have a bear-
ing on the social and political effects of texts; and (c) admit that this
is a matter that I can’t analyse further. This is an unsatisfactory state of
affairs but there it is, and it is best to get it off my chest at this early
stage.
Having said all that though, it occurs to me that there is at least one
analytical attempt to categorize literary works in terms of quality of gen-
eral reading experience that I could usefully refer to here and that could
be brought to bear on the Harry Potter books’ status as ‘easy reading’ or
‘popular literature’: categorization as ‘open texts’ and ‘closed texts’.
These terms come from Umberto Eco’s reflections on reading and texts. 1
Simplistically put, Eco suggested that there are broadly two kinds of texts.
There are those that can be read (interpreted) at a range of different
levels, and engage a large number of different (and even contradictory)
strategies and perspectives to make sense of them and derive pleasure
from them – i.e. the pleasure derives to a large extent from the very act
of negotiating between different and even contrary ways in which sense
can be made from them. Such texts are open texts. Closed texts are those
that can be read primarily and without much effort with one familiar
strategy and develop coherently through a single uncomplicated per-
spective – i.e. the pleasure in reading these derive from the predictability
of what the text presents and what the reader may find in it, the com-
fort and laziness of not having to negotiate with different and clashing
perspectives and strategies. Eco’s examples of closed texts include the
James Bond novels and Superman comics; among open texts he counts
James Joyce’s works. It is reasonably clear that Eco didn’t much approve
of readers who prefer closed texts: they are seen as ‘more or less precise
empirical readers’ who are themselves closed in categories: ‘children,

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 A Thought about Open and Closed Texts 31

soap opera addicts, doctors, law-abiding citizens, swingers, Presbyterians,

farmers, middle-class women, scuba divers, effete snobs or any other
imaginable sociopsychological category’. The reader of open texts is a more
alive and dynamic person, one who is ‘able to master different codes
and eager to deal with the text as a maze of many issues’, and is only
inevitably restrained by the physical limits of a text. 2 It is clear too that

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the closed texts are generally mass-market products, and the open texts
would be regarded as up-market.
This is a rather unfair simplification of what is in actuality a complex
exposition, but it would do for the present. It can be used to place
the Harry Potter books as being closed and directed towards empirically
precise readers who are (mainly) children – apparently an analytical
category to do with the quality of general reading experience. This
might not seem to be especially relevant to this essay on the social and
political implications of the Harry Potter books and phenomenon.
Obviously, Eco’s interests are primarily with the aesthetics of reading,
and mine more with the politics of reading. However, Eco’s reflections
do provide a particular insight that is relevant here. No matter how
apparently politically or socially neutral, how pristinely aesthetic, such
reflections and categorizations according to quality of general reading
experience might appear to be, the fact is that the very act of thinkingly
approaching them (Eco-like) inevitably brings to light a political and
social backdrop. After all, thinking about anything entails an act of
communication that would inevitably have social and political effects.
This is worth remembering. What becomes explicit in Eco’s thinking
categorization according to quality of general reading experience is that
it not only illuminates the literary works that are examined, it also
throws his own socially and politically effective stance open to interro-
gation. The above summary easily raises questions: Doesn’t that list of
empirically precise categories as opposed to intellectually active persons
have certain gender and class presumptions worked into it? Is not Eco
committing himself to a particular ideological position by offering such
schematic divisions between kinds of texts and kinds of readers? This is
worth bearing in mind.
Finally, social and political effects cannot be assessed in terms of what
is unthinking. Unthinking categorization of the Harry Potter books accord-
ing to the quality of general reading experience may have recognizable
social and political effects but they don’t matter to my thinking reading
of them. As soon as I am able, Eco-like, to give such categorization some
sort of thinking structure, by dint of doing so itself social and political
effects would come into play. It naturally follows that when I offer in

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32 Re-Reading Harry Potter

these pages such categories as unthinking reading and thinking reading,

and proceed to analyse the Harry Potter phenomenon with a text-to-world
methodology, there is undoubtedly a social and political aspect to what
I do as well. It is not my business to make that explicit, but to recognize
that it is inevitably there.

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6
The Irrelevance of J.K. Rowling

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What about the author? I can see this question creeping up upon me
from several directions. Did she intend that her books have the social and
political effects that they have had? Is she responsible for those effects?
There is a strong predisposition on the part of readers generally, in an
obvious and natural fashion, to assume that if texts mediate communi-
cation, that communication must be from the author to readers. There
is an undeniable logic about this: someone communicates to someone – if
books are involved in communication why shouldn’t we simply look to
the source of that book as much as the audience to understand what is
involved in the communication? J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books.
She must be the person that communicates through these books to
readers, and if there is a social and political effect from this book, it is
surely as important to understand what she thought she was about as to
comprehend what her readers thought they were about, and indeed as
much as those other invisible creators who shape those books with
Rowling (the cover designers, publishers, advertisers, etc.) might have
known what they were about. The latter are in some sense peripheral,
almost invisible, but Rowling’s author-ity (a well-worn pun now) stares
readers in the face on the cover of every one of the Harry Potter books, in
every review, interview, every bit of media coverage. It is perverse not to
take the author into account. Understandably, the Harry Potter phenom-
enon includes a perfect storm of interest in the author: admiring bio-
graphies of Rowling are cropping up steadily in book shops,1 interviews
are published in quantity, 2 she is honoured by several institutions,3 her
authorial status is quantified not just by prestige but by her financial
worth,4 hardly a review has failed to mention the circumstances in which
the first Harry Potter books were produced (single mother on the dole,
sums up the apparently not entirely accurate picture). Her statements

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34 Re-Reading Harry Potter

on the Harry Potter books are taken as gospel; she is honoured by children
and adults alike. The author has been incorporated into the Harry Potter
phenomenon. Just as unthinking readers become participant in the Harry
Potter phenomenon, are within the phenomenon rather than at any
analytical distance, so too is Rowling as the author.
In becoming so, it seems to me, her intentions and responsibilities as

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author diminish and fade into irrelevance. She ceases to be the author of
the phenomenon and simply becomes part of the phenomenon as author.
There is something familiarly perverse about saying that. It is reminis-
cent of the steady stream of pre-eminently thinking – thoughtful – writers
and readers, recognized and canonized as being such, who have sought
to take precisely this perverse position. It probably goes back to Gustave
Flaubert’s and other nineteenth-century realists’ and naturalists’ bid to
achieve a recording of reality that is so objective that the author as
a subject, a particular individual, leaves no trace in their writing.5 It is
found in the deliberate cultivation of an impersonal artist – impersonal to
the point of disappearing – that reputed Modernists (Joyce, Eliot, Pound)
cultivated.6 The fallacy of constantly trying to retrieve the author’s inten-
tion in the course of reading was explained by Wimsatt and Beardsley. 7
The death of the author was declared by Barthes.8 A series of critics have
chosen to look so closely at the forms, structures and linguistic nuances
of texts, the relation of texts to other texts, the relation of texts to the
historical circumstances out of which they devolve and into which
they constantly get accommodated, the social discourses out of which
texts emerge and into which texts are soaked up, that the author becomes
apparently unimportant and fades into irrelevance and neglect – this could
be seen as the substance of the development of literary critical theory. So
imperious has this calculated disregard of the author grown through the
1970s and 1980s and since, that unconvinced voices have occasionally
appeared, protesting against this new ‘critical orthodoxy’:

Cogent as the reasons for [excluding the author] have often appeared,
this talk of exclusion has done harm. It is better to think that all books
have this doubtful person, and they also have in them the doubtful
polity and community, whose claims he is praised for resisting and
ignoring. 9

Or again:

A massive disjunction opens up between the theoretical statement

of authorial disappearance and the project of reading without the

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 The Irrelevance of J.K. Rowling 35

author. What [texts holding such a theoretical position] say about

the author, and what they do with the author issue at such an
express level of contradiction that the performative aspects utterly
overwhelm the declaration of authorial disappearance. 10

Such grumblings have, however, only had a limited impact.

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But it is not the theoretical arguments about the relevance or irrele-
vance of the author that underlie my neglect of Rowling as author of
the Harry Potter books in a consideration of their social and political
effect. A somewhat different (and equally familiar) trajectory leads me
in that direction. It does not have to do with what literary critical argu-
ments have done with the idea of author-ship, it has more to do with
unthinking constructions of author-ship when the natural and obvious
presence of the author is taken for granted. It is the unthinking con-
struction of the author that ultimately is the more powerful, occasionally
disturbing careful critical arguments about author-ship and sometimes
seeping into those arguments themselves against the current. It is evi-
denced through the defeat in the marketplace that cannot be ignored:
literary biographies sell better than books of literary criticism. Appar-
ently readers, even well-trained and professionally sceptical and analytical
readers, seem to construct unthinkingly some sort of wraith of an author
when reading books and feel some desire to give it flesh. This is revealed
when their imagined constructions of authors are most gratingly chal-
lenged and they feel a need to admit that such constructions are at
stake. This occurs, for example, when a highly regarded literary theorist
(himself an advocate of the erasure of author-ity) is found also to have
been the author of some articles which express sympathy with a Fascist
position and this discovery somehow threatens to taint his writings; 11
when a widely admired set of poems are seen with different lenses
because it is suspected that the poet may have been anti-Semite; 12 when
the apparently autobiographical writing of one who presents himself as
a Jewish child survivor of the Holocaust is discredited because it is
discovered that he is not what he claimed to be;13 when an initially
sympathetically received novel about the travails of a South Asian family
in Britain apparently written by an Asian woman loses credibility
because the author is later revealed to be an English man14 . . . Such events
make good news, sensationally challenging the unthinking assumptions
about authors that readers almost always entertain. Such events also raise
critical controversies, causing unease because they subvert the unthink-
ing constructions of authors that exist among the most blasé theorists
and critics.

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36 Re-Reading Harry Potter

My point is that the ‘author’ who is talked about (like the ‘children’
who are mentioned in relation to understanding books for children) is
primarily a construct that emerges from readers’ engagement with texts.
The biographical subject who is the author, that individual who tangibly
personifies that construct, the author in flesh, may bear some resemblance
to this construct, may try to live up to that construct, may become that

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construct or may prove to have no relation to that construct (which
would be news to readers, and make even critics who deny author-ity
uncomfortable). The fact that an especially subversive mismatch between
the construct and the person causes consternation demonstrates that it
is the construct who is allocated or attributed responsibility for the texts –
it is the imagined author who, by proxy, bears responsibility for the texts,
who comes to personify the commitments that the texts seem to
present. The flesh-and-blood author is an inconvenience if she cannot
live up to the author of the imagination. And that simply reveals that the
former is not responsible for the texts (though indubitably having
produced them), the former has always something – a uniquely subjective
something – that can defy analysis as any occasionally inconsistent,
often contradictory, sometimes unpredictable individual in the world
that we inhabit can be.
So Rowling, the person who is interviewed and photographed and
biographically charted, is irrelevant to an understanding of the social
and political effects of the Harry Potter books. I don’t care whether that
Rowling can be held responsible for these effects, and I don’t think it
matters or can be determined. What matters for this essay is the con-
structed author (a constructed persona with social and political effect),
just as what matters for this study is children as a socially and politically
effective category rather than real children: the constructed persona and
the constructed category, like so much else, are integral aspects of the
Harry Potter phenomenon.
Interestingly, the construction of the author in relation to the flesh
and blood author is addressed in one of the Harry Potter books – in
Chamber. Gilderoy Lockhart appears in Chamber as a famous wizard
author, the hero of his own books, publicity-seeking and charismatic
(at least to women). Lockhart the person takes full and deliberate
responsibility for the author-construct who is so beloved in the wizard
world: he constructs himself as the hero of his books so that to his read-
ers the hero merges into their imagined author, who in turn merges
into the real person; he manages his public encounters with the media
and with his fans so that the imagined author and the real author can-
not be distinguished. At the same time though, with fatal arrogance

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 The Irrelevance of J.K. Rowling 37

and magical ineptitude, Lockhart constantly gives the mismatch between

the imagined author and the real author away to his students – at least
to the male students – and of course to the readers of Chamber. There is
a kind of inevitability about this mismatch: the author of the imagin-
ation is simply irreconcilable with the real author, the person who is
author. To hope it would be otherwise is a deception, and Lockhart is

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seen as being culpable from the beginning as a deceiver, a conman. To
some extent this inevitability is the result of Lockhart’s characteristic
duplicity and love of recognition; but, interestingly, when it comes to the
final confrontation and Lockhart is forced to face up to his fraudulent
practices he shifts the blame from himself. ‘Books can be misleading,’
he points out to Harry and Ron; and explains:

My books wouldn’t have sold half as well if people didn’t think I’d
done all those things. No one wants to read about some ugly Armenian
warlock, even if he did save a village from werewolves. He’d look
dreadful on the front cover. No dress sense at all. And the witch who
banished the Bandon Banshee had a hare lip. I mean, come on . . .
(Chamber 220)

Lockhart behaved as he did, in other words, because readers expected

him to, and those who cater to readers therefore expected him to. Lock-
hart had simply fulfilled the desire for the author-hero that already
existed, that the book industry could capitalize on, that the media
could play to. He became the image (literally, someone who looks good
on book covers, with the right dress sense) that readers wished to see:
the imagined construction of author-ity in the minds of readers, helped
along by the industry that deals in images. Not surprisingly, the most
intrepid reader of Hogwarts School, Hermione, seems to be curiously
blind to the flesh-and-blood Lockhart’s inadequacies and clings most
tenaciously to the author-image that she admires.
The unreliability of the constructed authors of books, who exist in
the readers’ imagination, is the leitmotif of Chamber. T.M. Riddle’s Diary –
a book too, but one in which authors become readers and readers authors,
where authors and readers meet and change places – is the site of the
ultimate violation of innocence. Through it the unscrupulous author
and reader, Tom Marvolo Riddle (past incarnation of the evil Voldemort),
exploits both the integrity of an author (‘It took a very long time for
stupid little Ginny to stop trusting her diary’ [Chamber 229]), and the
credulity of a reader (‘I wrote back, I was sympathetic, I was kind. Ginny
simply loved me’ [Chamber 228]).

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38 Re-Reading Harry Potter

So the books of Magic world – like images within books, on posters, in

paintings – have a life of their own (literally) which constantly thwart
readers. In Stone when Harry sneaked into the Restricted Section of
Hogwarts Library and opened a book: ‘A piercing, blood-curdling shriek
split the silence – the book was screaming! Harry snapped it shut, but
the shriek went on and on, one high, unbroken, ear-splitting note’

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(Stone 151). In Prisoner, Hagrid’s birthday present to Harry, The Monster
Book of Monsters, is described as ‘flip[ping] onto its edge’, ‘scuttl[ing] side-
ways along the bed like some weird crab’, ‘toppl[ing] off the bed’ and
‘shuffl[ing] rapidly across the room’ (Prisoner 15). The Monster Book of
Monsters later causes havoc in the bookshop of Diagon Alley, and in
Hogwarts; obviously not only is The Monster Book of Monsters a large
book about monsters, it is a monster itself.
This is an interesting theme, but what should readers of Harry Potter
books make of it? Is it to be regarded as a message from Rowling? Is it
Rowling warning her readers to be circumspect about how they construct
the author, and simultaneously announcing that her subjective real space
be left alone? Can she have deliberately and self-consciously intended
such a message, and is she responsible for the consequences that it might
have? These are questions of no interest in this essay. Irrespective of
how Rowling may respond to these questions such observations are there
to be inferred, and these inferences may have certain social and political
effects, and an author persona would be constructed and dubbed Rowling
by readers, and that construct may be held responsible for such effects
as occur.
Those questions might become relevant if the real-life Rowling did or
does anything to clash with the constructed author Rowling who already
exists, who has been active in the exponential, indeed monstrous, growth
of the Harry Potter phenomenon. The real-life Rowling has not been
discovered doing anything that clashes with the constructed author
who is spoken of. Both have, so far, merged seamlessly into a quiet and
reassuring and conservative mythology of women writing (especially
for children), that is not even as daring as the mythology of women
writing and producing children observed satirically by Roland Barthes
in Mythologies some time in the early 1950s:

Women, be therefore courageous, free; play at being men, write like

them; but never get far from them; live under their gaze, compensate
for your books by children; enjoy a free rein for a while, but quickly
come back to your condition. One novel, one child, a little feminism,
a little connubiality. Let us tie the adventure of art to the strong pillars

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 The Irrelevance of J.K. Rowling 39

of the home: both will profit a great deal from this combination: where
myths are concerned, mutual help is always fruitful. 15

The mythology of Rowling as the constructed author is a quieter one: it

is that of a woman, a mother, a lover of children, a charitable person who
is seen to write as such. She gives apartments to her friends, contributes

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to charities, marries, makes sure a British child plays Harry, and doesn’t
allow Coca-Cola to use Harry Potter too aggressively in marketing (pro-
tects children from becoming mindless consumers). It would take a very
old-fashioned and hardened Thatcherite Tory16 to find herself caught
out by the mythologized author who was a single mother on the dole
and made good and became one of the richest and most famous persons
in Britain.
That’s pretty much all I have to say about the author in this essay.

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7
Children’s Literature

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[A]nalytical and thinking reading is likely to be close to literary criticism
or interpretation (the institutional prerogatives are designed to encour-
age analysis and thought); but is not necessarily so. Literary criticism or
interpretation may also be weak in analysis and thinkingness, may be
constructed on questionable premises, may have contradictory or
limited methodologies that dilute its analytical qualities. Such interpret-
ation or criticism may be unthinking too, and become unthinkingly
participant in the social and political effect in question (thus trans-
ferring the institutional credentials to that effect, making it that much
stronger). This . . . has actually been the case with regard to the Harry
Potter books.

I am quoting myself here – or rather repeating myself – from Chapter 4,

where in the final point I had distinguished thinking and analytical
reading from the institutional practice of literary criticism or interpret-
ation. In an essay of this sort, which I know smells of institutional
practice itself, it is necessary to explain why I feel literary criticism and
interpretation of the Harry Potter books have to a large degree been
unthinking too.
In the following I do not attempt to give a comprehensive literature
survey of critical responses to the Harry Potter books, but rather a selective
sampling that indicates characteristic positions. The choice of the selected
examples allows me both to maintain a focus on the Harry Potter phe-
nomenon, and to deal with broad areas without getting swamped by
references to all the available theoretical and scholarly material. There
are three broad areas, characteristic of three kinds of critical positioning
pertinent to Harry Potter readings, which are covered here. These are, in
the order in which they are discussed, those that understand the Harry

40

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 Children’s Literature 41

Potter books as belonging to the literary genre of ‘children’s literature’,

those that place these books as belonging to the literary genre of ‘fantasy
literature’, and those that examine these from the perspective of religious
values. My arguments with regard to the first two are primarily directed
towards the assumptions implicit in making such genre placements; the
third necessarily engages with specific kinds of religious evaluation.

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I have already glibly introduced terms that carry some considerable
baggage of theoretical discussion. I don’t mean terms like ‘children’s
literature’ and ‘fantasy literature’ (I am not being glib about those), I mean
‘literary genre’. Using the term ‘literary genre’ as if it must be immediately
clear to my readers – who, like me, have probably used it often, have
a sense of the theoretical discussions that have surrounded it, and have
experience of seeing it used – is a habit that characterizes the methods
through which communities of literary critics and interpreters identify
themselves as such, make themselves known to each other as belonging
to such a community. It is the raison d’être of jargons. But doing so yet
again, while being struck by this aspect of such usage, leads to an
uncomfortable comprehension of the fuzziness of the term itself and
therefore of the limitations of its usefulness (and applicability and com-
prehensibility). It is at some level simple enough: it connotes modes of
categorizing the field of literature so that it becomes convenient (if not
quite clear) to deal with that field for those who are interested in it
(writers, readers, critics). But examples for clarifying what such categories
are is a more slippery enterprise (poetry, novels, plays, lyric, epic, romance,
children’s literature, fantasy literature, realistic literature, etc.): they over-
lap, they are difficult to characterize so that specific works of literature
can be unambiguously placed in them, they seem to derive from different
descriptive principles (formal, according to readership, thematic, etc.).
Every first-year literature undergraduate is faced with these difficulties,
doesn’t quite get used to it, but eventually gets accustomed to using the
term and thus becomes part of the comunity to critics (becomes institu-
tionalized). The attempt to give a general and inclusive definition itself
reveals the fuzziness of the terms and ultimately the communal function
that they serve. I might, for instance, have gone past this reflection on
‘literary genres’ with a quick reference to Tzvetan Todorov’s rather
suggestive and satisfying definition:

Genres are . . . entities that can be described from two different

viewpoints, that of empirical observation and that of abstract analysis.
In a given society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is
institutionalized, and individual texts are produced and perceived in

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42 Re-Reading Harry Potter

relation to the norm constituted by that codification. A genre, whether

literary or not, is nothing other than the codification of discursive
properties.1

But there are obvious dangers in doing that: it almost immediately draws
me, as it did Todorov, into a regression of further definitions (what

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do ‘empirical analysis’, ‘institutionalization’, ‘codification’, ‘discursive
properties’ mean?), which in turn involves further references and dis-
cussions, which have no discernible end if pursued very rigorously and
pertinaciously. I would probably just have to end this with the slightly
careworn discontent that Todorov himself expressed at the end of
a definitive and elaborative exercise regarding (not surprisingly) the
term ‘literary genre’:

The goal of knowledge is an approximative truth, not an absolute one.

If descriptive science claimed to speak the truth, it would contradict
its reason for being. . . . Imperfection is, paradoxically, a guarantee of
survival. 2

Even when a critic tries to avoid jargonistic usage of terms she may not
get very far from fuzziness. Since I have devoted some space to making
this point here, I might as well add that this applies equally to ‘children’s
literature’ – and, for that matter, ‘fantasy literature’, to which I come
later.
To simply assume that a particular text is self-evidently meant for
children and should therefore be approached as such is a less agonized
process. The idea that what is meant for whom is self-evident and
doesn’t need to be pondered too deeply is a relatively tranquil – and
unthinking – part of literary criticism, which simply gets along with
the job of analysing the immediate object of attention without worry-
ing much about the assumptions at work. This idea of the self-evidence
of what is ‘children’s literature’ may follow some such untroubled
argument as the following:

[D]espite the flux of childhood, the children’s book can be defined in

terms of the implied reader. It will be clear, from a careful reading,
who a book is designed for: whether the book is on the side of a child
totally, whether it is for the developing child, or whether it is aiming
somewhere over the child’s head. Whether the text can then be
given a value depends on the circumstances of use. 3

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 Children’s Literature 43

The glib use of the phrase ‘implied reader’, which I have drawn attention
to in Chapter 1, is one of those that announce the jargonizing of the
professional critic. And yet it is slipped in so smoothly and unassum-
ingly that it seems to make some immediate sense, and the rest follows
as a monument of healthy, clear, unconfused (and equally unthinking)
formulation. But start worrying about it and it all falls apart: Is the

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construct of the ‘implied reader’ (that is what Iser explicitly said the idea
of the ‘implied reader’ is4) quite the same as real children reading? Who
is doing the constructing? Does everyone construct the ‘implied reader’
in similar ways? If such constructions are going to be different (which
may be anticipated if we think about how many different ideas are in
circulation about what children should or shouldn’t be exposed to) then
aren’t the evaluations going to be different too? – and so on. But if we
don’t worry about that sort of thing, we have more or less established
a precedent of uncomplicated formulation and can move to ever more
adventurous, apparently commonsensical but implicitly unthinking,
further claims. A great many of the reviews and studies of the Harry
Potter books coming from professional critics with the stamp of institu-
tional authority behind them are such; it would be tedious to make
a list of these here, so I illustrate the point by quickly mentioning two
kinds of instances – one disapproving of the books and the other
approving.
Consider a comment such as the following – this is from a review by
George M. O’Har (actually a rather interesting one in some respects that
I come to later) at the moment when he reflects on the appeal of Harry
Potters as ‘children’s books’ to adults:

It is not so easy to understand why adults like these books. The writing
is competent, but fails to rise to the level of art. The story itself is
derivative, as are the characters that people it. Despite claims to the
contrary, the Potter books do not belong on shelves alongside Robert
Louis Stevenson, C.S. Lewis, Frances Hodgson Burnett, J.R.R. Tolkien,
Lewis Carroll, and Madeleine L’Engle. 5

I quote O’Har here mainly because of that list of names, which, he sug-
gests, Rowling’s could – but fails to – belong to. The names are, of
course, of eminent ‘children’s book’ writers and this is an act of fixing
a genre in terms of which the Harry Potter books must be assessed aesthet-
ically. It is not explained why this particular selection makes the best
points of comparison, since the modes of evaluation of the Harry Potter
books given there could apply to most conventional works of literary

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44 Re-Reading Harry Potter

fiction. It is simply assumed that these would be appropriate objects of

comparison because they are self-evidently known as ‘children’s books’.
This unthinking convention of naming certain books as belonging to the
genre of ‘children’s literature’ and then evaluating them comparatively,
though often the terms of evaluation have little to do with any feature
that is peculiar to that collection of books, is a ploy that has been manifest

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in a large number of comparative views of the Harry Potter books from
professional and institutionally approved pens.
A particularly gushing review of the Potter books by Roni Natov was
published in the specialist ‘children’s literature’ journal, The Lion and the
Unicorn, in 2001, which provides another kind of institutionally sanc-
tioned and unthinking approach. Here Natov starts by making some
confident comments on what children feel and think, which have the
character of someone with experience of these matters – not as an ex-child
(everyone is that), but as someone who has studied these matters – such as:

Harry embodies this state of injustice frequently experienced by chil-

dren, often as inchoate fear and anger – and its other side, desire to
possess extraordinary powers that will overcome such early and deep
exile from the child’s birthright of love and protection.6

And Natov ends with an equally confident assessment about the salutary
effect that Potter books would have on children: ‘The Harry Potter stories
center on what children need to find internally – the strength to do the
right thing, to establish a moral code.’7
I have no particular quibble with Natov’s views, which many people
would and obviously do agree with. But I am struck by the air of con-
fidence with which the certainty of knowing how children feel and
what children need is given, and by the even more overwhelming
certainty that the Harry Potter books should be subjected to that frame
of evaluation. What interests me is the unself-reflexive fashion in which
Natov speaks both on behalf of children (how they feel) and for children
(what they need), without interrogating the processes through which
her conclusions are arrived at – that simple uncomplicated assertion of
knowing about children. In fact, all the questions that have bothered me
above would resurface if those processes of knowing were revealed or
interrogated: the plain assertion of such knowledge seems to me to be
another kind of unthinking critical stance.
I could carry on in that pernickety, complaining fashion, picking up
a few lines here and a few lines there and holding them up fastidiously
as examples of unthinking assessments of Harry Potter books as ‘children’s

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 Children’s Literature 45

literature’, but I suspect that may get tedious. I move on instead to

a book that addresses the Harry Potter phenomenon in a usefully thought-
ful fashion, from a reputed specialist in ‘children’s literature’ – and
therefore says/reveals (a bit of both) something substantial about the
limitations of ‘children’s literature’ as an area of study and a genre
wherein certain books are located, in the context of the Harry Potter

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phenomenon (in fact this phrase is taken from this book). I have in
mind Jack Zipes’s Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s
Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (2001).
Jack Zipes’s book has the great advantage of being written with the
self-conscious commitment of a specialist in ‘children’s literature’ and
of being possessed of an analytical perspective that allows him to assess
that commitment, and its underlying assumptions, in a reasonably clear
fashion. The commitment is towards children as real persons in an all
too material world, who are materially acted upon by a range of factors
(corporations capitalizing on consumption by and for children, parents,
schools and other institutions, and, through the channels provided by
all of these as well as independently, i.e. books), and who have an
independent space with their own perspectives and are capable of
acting as independent agents. Zipes states this commitment early in the
book with the informed understanding that the current condition of
the world is such that the independent space and perspectives of children
are being denied:

I have always written with the hope that childhood might be redeemed,
not innocent childhood, but a childhood rich in adventure and
opportunities for self-exploration and self-determination. Instead,
I witness a growing regulation and standardization of children’s lives
that undermine the very sincere concern that parents have for their
young. 8

The main culprits in this process of ‘standardization of children’s lives’,

for Zipes, are corporate capitalist processes which exercise so ubiquitous
and encompassing a control on all aspects of the lives of parents and
children that, even without their realizing it, every aspect of their lives
and relations with each other become conditioned to corporate capitalist
interests. Every realm of children’s lives, even those that they feel are
within their control, and those of their parents as parents, and even those
that appear to be chosen for the good of children, are permeated by
these interests in invidious and subtle ways. These interests are ultimately

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46 Re-Reading Harry Potter

those that consolidate the material interests and power positions of those
who control corporations and allied institutions (and what is not, in
different ways, allied to corporations now?). Such interests perpetuate
the dominant corporate capitalists’ desires, fears, and perceptions of self-
superiority (racial, cultural, sexual, etc.) in insidious ways. Parents and
children are constantly sucked into unthinking collaboration with cor-

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porate capitalist processes, they think and act in ways which might appear
to be free but are actually homogeneous and extrinsically directed
(‘one-dimensional thinking’, Zipes calls it,9 echoing the 1960s Herbert
Marcuse10). In the course of presenting this overall argument Zipes also
marks out specific observations and research that support these views
and give some sense of children as independent agents who must be
defended and, in some sense, liberated.
Within this grand perspective of children in the world he locates
‘children’s literature’ as both a site that can be used (especially insofar
as the production and dissemination of books are controlled by corpor-
ations) to perpetuate the ‘standardization of children’, and one that
could be drawn into (in the writing and critical activity associated with
it) enabling a different experience for children and subverting ‘one-
dimensional thinking’. The latter can be done, Zipes suggests, by the
efforts of children’s writers who actively challenge dominant and
apparently obvious modes of thinking, though there is always the
danger that their works would be appropriated by the corporations. 11
This can also be done by the kind of critical awareness that thinking
critics of ‘children’s literature’ may bring regarding such books, to which
end he charts out a programme for critics of ‘children’s literature’.12 The
programme essentially lays out rules for careful analysis and greater
awareness (thinkingness, in my terms).
All this is well argued and laudable (bar a small and unavoidable
paradox which had been apparent to Marcuse too), 13 and it is certainly
a position presented with sincerity and in a well-researched fashion.
But with it we also need to take into account another strand of Zipes’s
argument regarding ‘children’s literature’: one that finds it difficult to
locate children except as adults’ constructs in any sphere of ‘children’s
literature’ or critical interpretations thereof (a more sophisticated and
academically resonant version of arguments given in Chapter 2 above).
This is expressed in various ways. It appears in trying to make sense of
the phrase ‘children’s literature’:

If we take the genitive case literally and seriously, and if we assume

ownership and possession are involved when we say ‘children’s

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 Children’s Literature 47

literature’ or the literature of children, then there is no such thing as

children’s literature, or for that matter children.14

Children are, of course, insofar as this phrase appears in any serious

consideration of them by adults, what adults understand children to be;
and children’s literature is what adults write, publish, distribute, buy

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and even read or read aloud. Inevitably, in working through this and
trying to understand how to characterize ‘children’s literature’ then Zipes
comes up with the notoriously useful ‘implied reader’, but with a much
clearer sense of its constructedness than in the instance cited above in
this chapter:

The necessity and decision to find a narrative mode to which children

might relate is what distinguishes the creative process that the children’s
book writer must undertake. In this process the writer conceptualizes
what the child as implied reader is – the age, the background, the
culture. The writer conceptualizes childhood, perhaps seeks to recap-
ture childhood or the child in herself, or wants to define what
childhood should be. 15

These remain, however, indelibly the author’s conception. Even in the

‘children’s literature’ critic’s programme (or manifesto) that Zipes presents,
children appear only as constructs within socio-historical, political and
institutional discourses.16 And finally he locates ‘children’s literature’
(logically enough in the context of the views summarized above) within
the processes of corporate capitalism:

We distinguish and misrecognize children’s literature in its form of

exchange value, as commodity. It is inevitable that we do this because
its symbolic value in our institutional practice necessitates this. Just
the very manner in which we think we are distinguishing children’s
literature from so-called adult literature belies the objective fact that
there is no such thing as children’s literature. On the other hand,
there is a commodity that takes the form of a book, textbook, comic
book, drawing book, religious book, gift book, and so on, that we use
and children use and we use with children.17

What happens here is that Zipes removes ‘children’s literature’ from the
implicit assumption of literally involving the independent agents that
are children (and therefore from making it his task to examine that
involvement), and relocates it within terms of analysis that apply to

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48 Re-Reading Harry Potter

markets and capitalist corporations. The latter terms are not those given
by corporations, but terms that form the basis of examining such corpor-
ations and their overall organization in a capitalist system – terms that
ultimately echo an original Marxist critique of capitalism (refracted
through a Marcuse-like perspective). In the course of this relocation,
children as independent persons become an incidental presence who

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are only acted upon, or only talked about in ways that essentially disregard
them (they are ‘misrecognized’).
The two strands of Zipes’s arguments do not sit comfortably with
each other – they undercut each other. It may be argued that if ‘children’s
literature’, and ‘children’ generally, are constructed within the sphere of
adult thinking, this may well be true of Zipes’s own formulations about
‘the standardization of childhood’ and the need to ‘redeem childhood’.
If ‘children’s literature’ as we are accustomed to speaking of it now
contains political and institutional interests that inevitably involve
a misrecognition, what guarantee is there that the ‘children’s literature’
that Zipes champions and promotes as subverting or correcting that
situation is not itself such a misrecognition too? After all, to try to
negate or correct is still to think in terms of that which is being negated
or corrected; that too is a construction that inevitably reflects political
and institutional concerns that do not derive from an apprehension
of children as independent persons. Further, if the whole sphere of
‘children’s literature’ is indeed discussable and analysable only in terms
of adult conceptualization and concerns, how can we be certain that
this has any analysable impact on children at all? Even if we believe
that such an impact must take place, how can we determine what sort
of impact that is? In other words, if we accept Zipes’s persuasive argu-
ments about the manner in which ‘children’s literature’ is inevitably
within the embrace of adult systems, politics, ideologies, so that an
understanding of children as such would always be intractable, then it is
difficult to see how he hopes to achieve any impact (however well
intentioned, redeeming or improving) on children as such through
‘children’s literature’. There would always exist some ambiguity about
whether what the critic thinks ‘children’s literature’ is communicating to
children is indeed what is actually communicated to children. It must
always be the case that children would have to be thought of as passive
sponges absorbing hidden and explicit attitudes, predispositions, ideas,
information, etc. (whether we like them or not) from the books they
read, and this construction of children as ‘implied readers’ could always
be thought of as some sort of ‘standardization of children’. Only adult
battles between different ideological positions, ideas, political beliefs,

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 Children’s Literature 49

and so on can be fought on the terrain of ‘children’s literature’: to try to

‘redeem childhood’ can be no more than a rhetorical flourish by Zipes
in another adult battle.
The only alternative to that conclusion would be a more thorough
and systematic examination of specific ways in which children do
actually read, through some empirical methodology of ascertaining this

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(perhaps with the aid of rigorous socio-psychological or neuro-scientific
experiments). As far as I am aware, this has seldom been the concern of
specialists in ‘children’s literature’. The contradiction that Zipes talks
about/reveals/is himself in the grip of in Sticks and Stones – i.e. the con-
tradiction between recognizing the constructedness of ‘children’ in the
context of ‘children’s literature’ (and criticism regarding it), and hoping
to impact in a material fashion on real children – is one that extends to
the discipline of ‘children’s literature’ in a larger sense. This is pondered
in a lucid manner by, for example, Kárin Lesnik-Oberstein when she
makes the three following points about ‘children’s literature’ critics:
(1) ‘children’s literature’ critics set out to judge which books are good
for children and why; (2) in each case this attempt depends on specific
understandings of terms like ‘children’, ‘children’s literature’, ‘literature’,
and it appears that each of these terms can be understood in a wide
variety of ways; (3) this variety of understandings in turn undercuts the
‘children’s literature’ specialist’s initial goal to prescribe for children,
which is lost in the attempt to validate her essential views.18
With these clarifications about the background of Zipes’s approach to
‘children’s literature’ it becomes easier to understand the general tenor
of his comments on the Harry Potter books. (I comment here briefly on
the general tenor, and pick up matters of detail later when I get down to
an analytical reading of these books myself.)
What Zipes does with the Harry Potter books is, in fact, not analyse
them in terms of how children have responded to them or as the great
mass of unthinking readers have pegged them as children’s books, but
see them as territory where the ideological proclivities of adults – a
general readership – operate and where children are used with political
and social effect. In analysing these, in other words, he calls for a thinking
and analytical approach (which could be exercised by critics) to oppose
the unthinking responses, and for a clarification of the manner in which
adults construct and enclose children within their terms:

I am not sure whether one can talk about a split between a minority
of professional critics, who have misgivings about the Harry Potter
books, and the great majority of readers, old and young, who are

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50 Re-Reading Harry Potter

mesmerized by the young magician’s adventures. But I am certain

that the phenomenal aspect of the reception of the Harry Potter books
has blurred the focus for anyone who wants to take literature for
young people seriously and who may be concerned about standards
and taste that adults create for youth culture in the West.19

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And a bit later:

. . . the only way to do Rowling and her Harry Potter books justice is
to try to pierce the phenomenon and to examine her works as
critically as possible, not with the intention of degrading them or her
efforts, but with the intention of exploring why such a conventional
work of fantasy has been fetishized so that all sort of magic powers
are attributed to the very act of reading these works. 20

It is readers’ unthinkingness that clearly worries Zipes. Of course, there

is within those words some inkling of the ‘children’s literature’ critic’s
commitment to defend children from getting ‘standardized’; but then
that is an inevitable aspect of Zipes’s disciplinary affiliation, which
I applaud but do not think is especially functional in what he says
about the Harry Potter books. There is also a valorization of the professional
critic’s clear-sightedness (an exaggeration) which we can probably put
down as Zipes’s effort to locate himself within a critical community and
win at least their sympathy, and also assert something of a communal
authority to his misgivings. But insofar as he addresses the Harry Potter
books, he wishes to do so in a rigorous analytical spirit, and as reflecting
ideological positions that pertain to the adult world wherein the children’s
world (insofar as it can be understood) is determined by ‘standards and
taste that adults create for youth culture’. It is also briefly suggested that
real children, insofar as Zipes has interrogated them, are not as passionate
about the Harry Potter books as their parents and other adults; he doubts
how far it occupies the world of children at the level of peer interaction.
So, for Zipes, the appeal of the Harry Potter books is primarily as
a marketing phenomenon and as a repository of ideological positions;
the Harry Potter books exercise certain social and political effects, which
include what their content conveys and the manner in which they are
packaged and sold. As far as the content goes, Zipes notes that the Harry
Potter books are conventional – they ‘celebrate male dominance and
blood rule’21 and follow a thoroughly conventional form – and it is
suspected that their success rests in the placating of conventional dominant
groups and the ease with which they fall into corporate processes and

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 Children’s Literature 51

endorse and further corporate interests. The details of Zipes’s assessment

of the conventionality of these books, and of their conservative attitudes
to gender and race, are matters that I address in some detail later. Besides,
in these details Zipes’s engagement with the Harry Potter books is in fact
cursory and superficial. He doesn’t provide a substantial and serious text-
ual reading of these books; he mainly recommends that such reading

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should occur and contents himself with making some provocative state-
ments that might initiate such an effort. What is worth noting for the
time being is that, despite his desire to approach children as independent
persons and ‘redeem childhood’ as a ‘children’s literature’ critic, what
Zipes essentially does is recommend a serious and analytical reading of
the Harry Potter books on the grounds that they are ideologically suspect –
they may have questionable social and political effects (on young and old
alike, perhaps more so on the young).
In this context, a somewhat more extended consideration of the Harry
Potter books specifically, which follows a theoretical background that is
in some ways similar to Zipes’s, is Andrew Blake’s The Irresistible Rise of
Harry Potter (2002). The background similarity is not in affirming the
commitments of a ‘children’s literature’ specialist, but in assuming
a similar ideological position and presumptively placing ‘children’ and
‘children’s literature’ accordingly. Though Blake doesn’t allow himself
sufficient space to develop a systematic perspective of ‘children’ and
‘children’s literature’, insofar as he implicitly deals with both he repeats
many of the points made succinctly by Zipes. He places the Harry Potter
books in comparison with other works of ‘children’s literature’;22 he
analyses the impact of these particularly in terms of the experience of
children and teachers in British schools in the 1990s;23 he also dwells on
the Harry Potter phenomenon as the product of corporations capitalizing
on children’s and teenage consumerism. 24 But these are embraced to
a much larger degree in Blake’s book by his ideological position (which
he appears to share to an extent with Zipes) and political interests – a
distrust of corporate capitalist industry and governance that draws every
kind of cultural phenomenon (literature, music, art, media reportage,
television programmes) and subject (children, parents, communities,
countries) into a consumerist society and social organization. Like Zipes,
Blake argues that the Harry Potter books manifest ambiguities regarding
class, gender and race25 that may be connected to an alignment with
implicit superstructural prejudices in contemporary capitalist politics.
But unlike Zipes, Blake airs his discontent not in terms of a primary
focus on ‘children’ as a political category, but in terms of an overriding
interest in specifically British politics and culture in the late 1990s, in

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52 Re-Reading Harry Potter

the New Labour ethos of Britain. Blake concerns himself not so much
with the consumerism and commodification of ‘children’, as with what
he calls the ‘retrolutionary’ (a nostalgic invention of an idealized past in
the present) nature of the Harry Potter novels, and the manner in which
they are used for the magical New Labour ‘branding’ of Britishness.26
Zipes concern with the condition of ‘children’ as a category in contem-

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porary corporate capitalism gives his study a global air; Blake’s view of
‘children’, Potter books and corporate capitalism is confined to a narrow
view of British national politics (or in such interest in Britain as a brand
name as may exist in the global marketplace). The similarities (including
similar sorts of confusions) between Zipes’s and Blake’s comments of
the Potter books are ultimately more in the details than in political
overview, and these again I touch upon where appropriate in the next
part.
Incidentally, despite being devoted (unlike Sticks and Stones) entirely
to the Harry Potter books Blake also pays (like Sticks and Stones) only the
most perfunctory attention to the texts. Some plot summaries and
summaries of events are racily thrown in, with little attention to textual
details or a holistic consideration of the books, to fit them into his British
political perspective. Those in turn are connected to a sketch of the
1990s British cultural and political scene, which itself touches fleetingly
on a plethora of relevant and not so relevant, but all peculiarly British
(or American but sieved through British sensibilities), cultural and political
phenomena.
I have, as I have mentioned, more to say about specific points in Zipes’s
and Blake’s books in Part II. More immediately, the question that brings
us to the close of this chapter: where do the above considerations of
‘children’s literature’-centred critics’ positions with regard to the Harry
Potter books leave me in my endeavour to conduct a text-to-world reading
of these with a view to discerning their social and political effects? The
following resolutions and clarifications delineate the position of this
essay further:

• I reconfirm my earlier decision (Chapter 2) not to try to gauge how

children have responded to the Harry Potter books, or to prescribe for
children, or to try to improve the lot of children. Insofar as that is
what ‘children’s literature’ specialists do this essay is unlikely to be of
much interest to them, and I do not count myself as a ‘children’s
literature’ specialist. If this essay does have any impact on the lives of
children it would be an incidental impact which I have neither
intended and nor tried to prevent.

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 Children’s Literature 53

• I also reconfirm my decision to address ‘children’ and ‘children’s

literature’, if at all, as categories that have social and political effect for
and from adults. Insofar as ‘children’ are talked about with regard to and
(I might as well add this here) appear in the Harry Potter books, I take
that to be an adult’s construction that reflects adult concerns and ideo-
logical positions, and have social and political effects in those terms.

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• I realize that I need to be more precise about what I mean by terms
like ‘children’ and ‘children’s literature’ being used as adults’ con-
structions with social and political effect. In this my views are similar
to those of Zipes’s that I have mentioned above. But several dis-
tinctions can be made here. (a) Insofar as ‘children’ are constructed
as/assumed to be/shown to be passive persons (readers) who imbibe
socially and politically pertinent positions tacitly through the medium
of ‘children’s literature’, those terms are a convenience. Such terms
conveniently allow ideological positions to be presented with the
least self-consciousness (as being obvious) and minimal rationalization
(the reader is unlikely to interrogate). Also, any questioning of given
ideological positions can itself be made to appear self-evident and
obvious too. (b) Insofar as ‘children’ are understood as ‘implied read-
ers’ within ‘children’s literature’ books, they can be used as proxy for
straightforward statements of commitments and convictions. Thus
‘children’s literature’ books become sites where people do not have
to take direct responsibility for their social and political claims, but
can present these as claims being made by adults for and on behalf of
children. The construction of ‘children’ as ‘implied readers’ absolves
people from making certain aspects of their socially and politically
effective positions clear, or dealing with the difficult connotations
therein. (c) Insofar as ‘children’ are seen as the unique and pre-
eminent consumers for ‘children’s literature’ books (and other such
products) they are the constructed targets that enable corporatons to
mediate the movement of the book from author to reader. In this
‘children’ become a particular niche in the market, a particular
channel of financial transactions that invisibly incorporate adults,
a specific field of representation and innovation. To some extent this
kind of construction (with slightly different prerogatives) also works
for educational and other institutions devoted to children. (d) Under-
lying all the above there operates some such notion that ‘children’
represent a sort of modelling clay into which the condition of the
future can be moulded, and ‘children’s literature’ is one of the
techniques involved in this moulding. Thus the social and political
positions and effects available in ‘children’s literature’ may be regarded

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54 Re-Reading Harry Potter

as utopian blueprints – gesturing towards an ideal vision of the future –

from different social and political perspectives. Whatever the role
of ‘children’s literature’ books in actually moulding children (some-
thing that I have decided not to worry about here), they reveal
idealized aspirations of existing social and political positions (this
does interest me).

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As a conclusion for this chapter I feel I should mention the salutary
example of Jacqueline Rose’s careful and thought-provoking work on
J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan – The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of
Children’s Fiction (1984) – the attitude of which (though not the methods
and themes) accords so closely to my own here that I cannot resist two
final quotations from its introduction:

Children’s fiction is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot be

written (that would be nonsense), but in that it hangs on an impossi-
bility, one which it rarely ventures to speak. This is the impossible
relation between adult and child. Children’s fiction is clearly about
that relation, but it has the remarkable characteristic of being about
something which it hardly ever talks of. Children’s fiction sets up
a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the
child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of
them enter the space in between.27

And onwards:

Let it be said from the start that it will be no part of this book’s
contention that what is good for the child can somehow be better
defined, that we could, if we shifted the terms of the discussion,
determine what it is that the child really wants. It will not be an issue
here of what the child wants, but of what an adult desires – desires in
the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech.28

Rose’s curiosity is drawn primarily by the manner in which the child is

construed inside texts of different sorts to do with Peter Pan. This essay
isn’t especially interested in the construing of children inside literary
texts (the Harry Potter books). But this essay equally eschews any
determination to discover what a child ‘really wants’; and it is primarily
concerned with adult readers, social and political effects which are
primarily discernible among adults, and in the midst of which there
must be, mustn’t there, desire somewhere.

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8
Fantasy Literature

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Apart from the genre of ‘children’s literature’, the Harry Potter books
are also often located in the genre of ‘fantasy literature’. Literary critics
have been attentive to the nuances of ‘fantasy literature’ as a genre in
two ways: either by attempting to describe its formal and thematic
characteristics (there is a longish tradition of this), or by attempting to
locate and understand ‘fantasy literature’ in terms of social and political
environments and effects (a relative recent tendency). The latter is
naturally of greater interest in this essay and this chapter is largely
devoted to that. Only brief consideration is given here, therefore, to the
status of the Harry Potter books as ‘fantasy literature’ in a formal or
thematic fashion.
The only observation about the latter that is worth making here is
that certain rigorous definitions of ‘fantasy literature’ – or of the ‘fantastic’
in literature – can effectively exclude such books as the Harry Potter
series. This is noteworthy since it does seem wholly obvious that these
are in fact aptly placed in ‘fantasy literature’. But precise definitions of
the ‘fantastic’ may entail reconsideration of the generic location of books,
and dislocation of the seemingly obvious example of ‘fantasy literature’.
Such dislocations are useful in that they encourage a renewed awareness
of that which had seemed obvious. In questioning unthinking assump-
tions with a view to developing an analytical perspective, dislocation of
the seemingly obvious (evidently closely allied to the unthinking) is
undoubtedly a crucial ploy. I say this in a somewhat oracular fashion,
but safe in the familiarity of literary or philosophical pondering on
concepts like ‘alienation’ and ‘defamiliarization’ (so familiar that I wouldn’t
venture a discussion, or even a footnote here). For the sake of such
dislocation then, if nothing else, a questioning of the category of ‘fantasy
literature’ is useful before the Harry Potter books are comfortably placed

55

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56 Re-Reading Harry Potter

in its fold. Let’s consider then the influential definition of the ‘fantastic’
as a literary genre (with a formal emphasis) by Todorov in 1970:

The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text
must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as
a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and

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a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this
hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s
role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the
hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work – in
the case of naïve reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the
character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard
to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations.
These three requirements do not have an equal value. The first
and the third actually constitute the genre; the second may not be
fulfilled. 1

What is interesting about the Harry Potter books is that the Magic world
is so carefully distinguished from the Muggle world that any question
of hesitating between a natural and a supernatural explanation is pretty
much out of question. Ostensibly, the sphere of the natural and the
sphere of the supernatural are held apart consistently all through, and
distinct rules and modes of explanation attach to each. There isn’t
much space for hesitation here. But was there perhaps a moment of
hesitation in the first transition from Muggle to Magic world in Stone,
a hesitation that is perhaps re-enacted, and of which readers are
reminded, at the beginning of each book in the series (each book is
introduced through a re-enactment of Harry’s passage from the Muggle
household of the Dursleys to a Magic realm)? A closer examination of
even that peripheral moment of the beginning (not the central feature
of the series and therefore probably not enough for it to be located
within the genre of the fantastic according to Todorov) is not designed
to inspire hesitation. Both Harry and the Dursleys are, in fact, insurance
against that: the Dursleys’ overwhelming reaction to magic is irritation,
not surprise, from the beginning; and Harry’s preoccupation is more to
hide his powers from them than to wonder at his having magical
abilities. Apart from the Dursleys and Harry, the Muggle world at large
is constructed to be curiously uncurious about the strange and unex-
pected, somehow constitutionally incapable of surprise and hesitation.
Consider the Muggle television news report on unusual happenings
in Stone:

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 Fantasy Literature 57

‘And finally, bird-watchers everywhere have reported that the

nation’s owls have been behaving very unusually today. Although
owls normally hunt at night and are hardly ever seen in the daylight,
there have been hundreds of sightings of these birds flying in every
direction since sunrise. Experts are unable to explain why the owls
have suddenly changed their sleeping pattern.’ The newsreader

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allowed himself a grin. ‘Most mysterious. And now, over to Jim
McGuffin with the weather. Going to be any more shower of owls
tonight, Jim?’
‘Well, Ted,’ said the weatherman, ‘I don’t know about that, but it’s
not only owls that have been acting oddly today. Viewers as far apart
as Kent, Yorkshire and Dundee have been phoning in to tell me that
instead of the rain I promised yesterday, they’ve a downpour of
shooting stars! Perhaps people have been celebrating Bonfire Night
early – it’s not until next week, folks! But I can promise a wet night
tonight.’ (Stone 10–11)

What this description does is: (a) place the Muggle world that is pre-
sented as taking such events in their stride without surprise, and
(b) rebounding into reflecting on the phenomenal real world of the
reader, or our world. Those familiar with British television news broad-
casts would recognize the general features of this exchange, would
know that that kind of light-hearted banter between newscasters
(‘Going to be any more shower of owls tonight, Jim?’) is considered
rather smart on the BBC, would recognize that the location of these
news items is on the periphery (the moment before the weather report,
reserved for the relatively trivial on the BBC, and the weather bulletin
itself, an unexciting but inevitable adjunct to the news). And with
these recognitions comes the suspicion that instead of drawing the
reader into the wondrous element of magic, the magical has pushed
the reader into reflecting on the familiarity of news items. Does this
passage perhaps playfully reflect on the manner in which the momen-
tous and strange are rendered mundane and slight on the news media,
by their very appearance in the media? Is this an ironic comment on
the insensitivity and jokey lack of curiosity that pervades our culture?
In these reflections there is a tendency to reach towards ‘allegorical’
explanations2 – which of course is exactly what, according to Todorov,
lies outside the genre of the fantastic in literature. And if we persist
with Todorov, we do find a quite different category that might fit the
Harry Potter books somewhat better than the fantastic: Todorov thinks
of it as the ‘marvelous’, and comments more specifically (and pertinently

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58 Re-Reading Harry Potter

insofar as Harry Potter books go) to fairy tales as a particular kind of the
‘marvelous’:

In the case of the marvelous, supernatural elements provoke no

particular reaction in either the characters or in the implicit reader.
It is not an attitude toward the events described which characterizes

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the marvelous, but the nature of these events . . .
We generally link the genre of the marvelous to that of the fairy
tale. But as a matter of fact the fairy tale is only one of the varieties of
the marvelous, and the supernatural events in fairy tales provoke no
surprise: neither a hundred years’ sleep, nor a talking wolf, nor the
magical gifts of the fairies (to cite only a few examples in Perrault’s
tales). What distinguishes a fairy tale is a certain kind of writing, not
the status of the supernatural. 3

This seems to fit the style of writing and placement of the supernatural
in the Harry Potter books somewhat better than the fantastic.
Thinking in terms of rigorous formal/thematic reader-centred definitions
such as Todorov’s may jerk some readers out of unthinking assumptions
in useful ways. More importantly, the effort allows for clarifications of
the text that may impinge upon a text-to-world approach with a view
to discerning social and political effects. However, despite the above, let
me, along with many others, assume that the Harry Potter books do fall
into a loosely (rather than rigorously) defined and inclusive category of
‘fantasy literature’ – something such as:

Whatever the material, extravagant or seemingly commonplace, a

narrative is a fantasy if it presents the persuasive establishment and
development of an impossibility, an arbitrary construct of the mind
with all under the control of logic and rhetoric.4

This bare skeleton of a definition would, of course, include something

like the Harry Potter books.
As far as assessing the social and political effects of ‘fantasy literature’
goes, a fair amount of scholarly attention has been given to this since
the 1980s. A determination to examine ‘fantastic literature’ squarely in
terms of its social context resulted in the influential book by Rosemary
Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981). As the title indicates,
Jackson was interested in fantasy as a genre that questions existing
dominant social and political positions (she also provided an excellent

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 Fantasy Literature 59

survey of formalistic and thematic considerations of ‘fantasy literature’

as a genre), and sometimes actually undermines them (which explains
the radical sounding ‘subversion’). Jackson made a crucial distinction
right at the beginning of her book to show that fantasy, by presenting
and playing with alternative, inverted, distorted, reversed, etc. perspec-
tives, actually thereby expresses a certain disenchantment with dominant

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ideologies, brings to light certain desires that are repressed because of
dominant ideologies. In the process of doing so ‘fantasy literature’ may
have two kinds of outcome: it could through that process simply accord
a subversive recognition and validity to those desires, or it could (in
a therapeutic and conservative fashion) get rid of those desires:

In expressing desire, fantasy can operate in two ways (according to the

different meanings of ‘express’): it can tell of, manifest or show desire
(expression in the sense of portrayal, representation, manifestation,
linguistic utterance, mention, description), or it can expel desire, when
this desire is a disturbing element which threatens cultural order and
continuity (expression in the sense of pressing out, squeezing, expulsion,
getting rid of something by force). 5

After making this distinction Jackson decided, for reasons best given in
her own words, to focus her theoretical and textual analysis on the former
sort of ‘fantasy literature’:

Those texts which attempt to [recover desire] have been given most
space in [my] book, for in them the fantastic is at its most uncom-
promising in its interrogation of the ‘nature’ of the ‘real’.
One consequence of this focus is that some of the better known
authors of fantasy works (in the popular sense) are given less space
than might be expected. For example, the best-selling fantasies by
Kingsley, Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin or Richard Adams are not discussed
at great length. This is not simply through prejudice against their
particular ideals, nor through an attempt to recommend other texts
as more ‘progressive’ in any easy way, but because they belong to that
realm of fantasy which is more properly defined as faery, or romance
literature. The moral and religious allegories, parables and fables
informing the stories of Kingsley and Tolkien move away from the
unsettling implications which are found at the centre of the purely
‘fantastic’. Their original impulse may be similar, but they move from
it, expelling their desire and frequently displacing it into religious

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longing and nostalgia. Thus they defuse potentially disturbing, anti-

social drives and retreat from any profound confrontation with
existential dis-ease.6

The long quotation is justified because of the clarity with which it lays
out an influential critical choice in the criticism of ‘fantasy literature’. It

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does two things: first, it marks out some ‘popular’ ‘best-selling’ fantasies
(in a loose sense) as being conservative in temper and therefore (despite
her protestations) not worthy of serious critical attention; second, it covers
up the ideological proclivities that guide the decision to deliberately
neglect the conservative, by expelling conservative fantasies from the realm
of fantasy (rigorously defined Todorov-style, except that in his formalistic/
thematic terms Todorov did engage with the purely marvellous and
uncanny) altogether. It also suggests implicitly that there is some sort of
connection between popular and best-selling ‘fantasy literature’ and its
conservativeness, without expressing too much analytical curiosity about
this. Indeed, it represses any critical desire to examine the conservative-
ness of expelling desire, the social and political effects of that expulsion
of desire, the contexts in which these effects come to be popular and
widely considered as desirable, etc. – all interesting issues.
This repression of critical curiosity has regretfully become characteris-
tic of most serious analyses of ‘fantasy literature’ thereafter; unless, that
is, literary texts which belong to the expelling-desire category of ‘fantasy
literature’ can be deemed to have become historically important – revealing
expelled subversive desires of some bygone period, anaesthetized by
time. Thus a substantial amount of serious critical analysis has been
devoted to popular Victorian fantasies (which, in Jackson’s terms, could
be thought of as ‘expelling’ rather than ‘recovering’ desire),7 and some
of the names that Jackson so blithely dismisses (Tolkien, Lewis) are
rapidly entering the category of the historically relevant popular fantasy.
Serious critical attention has also been drawn to sub-categories of what
may be regarded as desire-expelling ‘fantasy literature’, especially where
the sub-categorical qualifications are perceived as complicating (or even
contradicting) the connotations of the fantastic. Thus, the so-called
‘science fiction fantasies’, where the calling of ‘science’ into the service
of ‘fantasy’ leads to rather delicious tensions, has been food for some crit-
ical debate;8 as has ‘children’s fantasy literature’ or ‘fantasy literature by
women’, where consideration for children (I have already discussed the
usual ‘children’s literature’ specialist’s commitments) and debates surround-
ing gender give a particular piquancy to the subversive possibilities
associated with fantasy.9 But, apart from these, serious critics investigating

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 Fantasy Literature 61

the social and political effects of ‘fantasy literature’ in general have tended
to make Jackson’s choice their own, and pay attention primarily to
subversive (rather than conservative and often therefore popular) ‘fantasy
literature’ – in which it can always be suspected that apart from
ideological inclination some notion of high and low taste also has a not
inconsiderable (unthinking?) role to play. At any rate, such more recent

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overviews of the theory and practice of ‘fantasy literature’ as, for example,
Lucie Armitt’s Theorizing the Fantastic (1996), confidently assert:

Now we can look at the fantastic as a form of writing which is about

opening up subversive spaces within the mainstream rather than
ghettoizing fantasy by encasing it within genres. In the process it also
retains its important subversive properties without capitulating to
classification.10

‘Fantasy literature’ has been withdrawn, it appears, from the enclosures

of Todorov-style formalistic/thematic classification into genres (sub-
categories notwithstanding); but equally it has been enclosed (in the
name of being opened up) within some sort of political commitment to
‘subversive spaces within the mainstream’ (Armitt calls upon a range of
highly regarded theorists to support this) that refuses to engage with
the conservative effects of some popular ‘fantasy literature’ (unless tastily
sub-categorized and thereby, perhaps and somehow, rendered subversive).
As a matter of symmetry I feel I should also mention Jacqueline
Rose’s innovative insertion of fantasy into explicitly political texts and
discourses in States of Fantasy (1999).11 That texts (literary to a large
degree, but not just literary) that have explicit social and political
content and effects, especially in the troubled contexts of our time
(Israel–Palestine, South Africa), derive from and merge into the fantastic
core of political desires, utopian imaginings of different sorts, and
constructed communities, is not an unexpected observation – the specific
contexts and texts Rose chooses to make her points, however, are
uncharted territory from this perspective. But it is a matter of symmetry
that reminds me of Rose’s work here: the contexts and texts she deals
with are as distant in their associations as it is possible to be from the
Harry Potter books. Fantasy, as much as social and political effects,
indeed through social and political effects and vice versa, evidently
crosses the boundaries of associations and draws bridges across the
apparently incompatible.
Critical discussions of Harry Potter books that have treated these as,
simply, ‘fantasy literature’ rather than as ‘children’s fantasy literature’

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62 Re-Reading Harry Potter

(with the emphasis on children’s in all the senses outlined in the previous
chapter) are few and far between. The status of the Harry Potter books
as ‘fantasy literature’ has however been accepted widely as being
self-evident and obvious, indeed so much so that it can merely (and
unthinkingly) be mentioned as something that everyone in their right
minds would simply know. Apart from explorations of rigorous defin-

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itions of genre (in Todorov-style), there is of course no need to interrogate
such unthinking inclusion in a loosely defined genre (I have myself
accepted the status of the Harry Potter books as ‘fantasy literature’ in that
spirit above); but even so, and despite accepting the unthinking inclu-
sion, there remain questions that may be thinkingly investigated. What
are the social and political implications of such inclusion?
A useful critical paper which does approach the Harry Potter books
more as ‘fantasy literature’ than as ‘children’s fantasy literature’ (which,
as with Zipes in Chapter 7, I treat as being representative of this kind
of approach) is John Pennington’s ‘From Elfland to Hogwarts; or the
Aesthetic Trouble with Harry Potter’ (2002). As the title suggests, what
the paper ostensibly does is question the aesthetic status of the Harry Potter
books as ‘fantasy literature’; and what I suggest below is that what
Pennington thinks of as an aesthetic matter is actually a social and
political matter. Pennington presents his agenda as an aesthetic one, and
explicitly to do with fantasy, with admirable authority:

My trepidation over the Harry Potter series is founded on the discon-

nect between what the books attempt to say . . . and how Rowling says
them, a disconnect between form and content. No matter how popular
Harry Potter remains, I argue that on aesthetic grounds the series is
fundamentally failed fantasy. . . . The rule-bending/breaking in the
Triwizard Tournament is a metaphor for Rowling’s basic violation of
fantasy literature ground-rules – she violates the integral rules of the
fantasy game, never accepting the integrity of the very fantasy
tradition that she is mining for riches. And thus the aesthetic trouble
with Harry Potter. 12

This is not as immediately clear as it sounds. What I think Pennington

asserts here is that ‘what a book attempts to say’ should be dictated by
the form it uses (in this case that of ‘fantasy literature’) and ‘how it is
said’ constitutes the content of the product (the Harry Potter books as
they stand) – and that in the case of the Harry Potter books, what the
form used dictates (‘fantasy literature ground-rules’) is not what is
actually delivered in the end-products (those rules are ‘violated’). This

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is confusing because ‘what a book says’ is usually associated with content

(in the sense of referring to the particular story, the main themes, the
characters and situations in question, etc.); while ‘how it is said’ is
generally associated with form (in the sense of referring to the use of or
departure from stylistic and rhetorical conventions, narrative strategies,
etc.). But let me accept the somewhat counterintuitive usage of terms

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here. Three questions arise from this assertion: (1) what exactly are the
‘integral rules’ that the form of ‘fantasy literature’ dictates? (2) why do
the Harry Potter books seem to adhere to the form of ‘fantasy literature’,
the rules of which they should obey?; and (3) how exactly do the Harry
Potter books break those rules? Pennington’s answers are, as far as
I understand them, as follows. For one: the form of ‘fantasy literature’
demands that some notion of ‘consensus reality’ be changed, or that
the reality which we take to be obvious and normal should be ques-
tioned (or, dare I make the connection, subverted?) by the presentation
of a literary world where the obvious and the normal are no longer so.
Pennington draws upon Kathryn Hume 13 to make this point:

Kathryn Hume suggests that the two impulses that define literature are
mimesis – the ‘desire to imitate’ – and fantasy – which ‘desires to
change givens and alter reality’. Consequently, Hume defines fantasy as
‘any departure from consensus reality, an impulse native to literature
and manifested in innumerable variations, from monster to metaphor.14

One may also note in passing that Pennington appears to be misreading

Hume in using these quotations to define the particular form of ‘fantasy
literature’ since these quotations appear to use fantasy in an abstract
sense as a characteristic of all literature. Two: Pennington obviously thinks
that the Harry Potter books adhere to the form of ‘fantasy literature’ by
presenting a superficial alternative reality (the juxtaposition of Magic
world and Muggle world) and through certain inter-textual resonances
(there are covert and overt references to other ‘fantasy literature’ books
and their alternative worlds). Three: Pennington argues that the
alternative reality that the Harry Potter books present is only superficial
(operating at the level of the textualized Magic and Muggle worlds), but
at a deep level there is no alternative proposed (because the Magic world
is actually just a version of the readers’ or our world, following the rules
of our ‘consensus reality’):

On a fundamental level, Rowling is unwilling – or unable – to depart

from this consensus reality; her novels, for all their ‘magical’ trappings,

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are prefigured in mundane reality, relying too wholly on the realm from
which she simultaneously wants to escape. 15 [My emphases – the
emphasized terms play out the superficial/deep opposition]

He gives a series of reasonably persuasive demonstrations of this that

I do not need to go into at the moment. He also suggests that this

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makes the Harry Potter novels less effective than some of the fantasy
books that are covertly or overtly referred in them, especially since the
latter have managed to challenge a consensus reality successfully. Penning-
ton more or less suggests that the inter-textual element in the Harry
Potter books is a mode of claiming the success of other fantasy books
without being in their league.
There are too many problems with Pennington’s analysis if we try to
understand it as an ‘aesthetic’ analysis. The distinction between content
and form is not clear, between the ‘what is said’ and the ‘how it is said’.
All the points he makes are with reference to what is normally thought
of as content, and usual expectations of formal analysis are actually
hardly addressed. It is not clear why a fantasy has to be a deep question-
ing of ‘consensus reality’ and cannot be a superficial presentation of
an alternative reality that is materially different in some ways to what
we think of as our world. Why is it assumed that a fantasy that, for
example, simply imagines that speedy travel can be achieved through
magic rather than technology be any less of a fantasy than one that, for
example, also imagines the deeper economic and psychological effects
of such an possibility? Why, moreover, must we accept that certain
accepted forms (pertinent to past experience of reading and writing
‘fantasy literature’) must dictate future works that are broadly understood
as being affiliated to those forms (that the past experience cannot be
tampered with)? To accept that would be to deny any progression in
literary reading and writing. Most crucially, it is not clear why certain
thematic and stylistic qualities are better (more successful) than others
(which are failures) – what are the aesthetic evaluative criteria at work
here?
Many of these problems however simply disappear if we do not press
Pennington’s emphasis on the aesthetic too far, and if we simply read
his preferences and observations as matter of ideological critique or
based on a social and political perspective. What happens above is that
Pennington simply follows the tradition of thinking about ‘fantasy
literature’ established with Rosemary Jackson, and assumes its preju-
dices. Pennington, like Jackson, is more drawn to what appears to be
subversive fantasies, and tends to be dismissive of what he suspects to

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 Fantasy Literature 65

be conservative fantasies (quite possibly for the same reasons as Jackson’s,

as a political position). Also like Jackson, Pennington is inclined to
justify this preference not by a straightforward acknowledgement of the
political position from which it derives, but by simply labelling the con-
servative fantasy as not really fantasy at all (Jackson had glibly put it
out of the fantasy genre into fairly-tale; Pennington calls it ‘failed fan-

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tasy’). What Pennington effectively means is that he suspects that the
Harry Potter books are conservative fantasies, and because he has more
progressive or radical political convictions he doesn’t like them. What
he says to avoid having to own up to a particular political perspective is
that conservative fantasies are failed fantasies on aesthetic grounds.
What I think Pennington means is reasonably coherent (even if we do
not agree with Pennington’s politics); what I think Pennington says is, on
close scrutiny, not coherent (it is difficult to understand Pennington’s
aesthetics). It is interesting that Pennington also (like Jackson) finds
that his ideological proclivities are not necessarily popular ones (he
speaks ‘no matter how popular Harry Potter remains’), but he prefers to
put this down with typical academic confidence in the inferior aesthetic
discernment of the masses.
None of the arguments in this chapter, of course, actually demonstrates
that the Harry Potter books should be regarded as conservative fantasies.
I have not discussed that aspect of what I think Pennington means. I have
addressed the structure and assumptions of his arguments, not the,
often persuasive, demonstrations that he gives. I do address this squarely
when I get down to a text-to-world reading of the Harry Potter books
with a view to understanding their social and political effects.
So where does this discussion of ‘fantasy literature’ leave me insofar
as I undertake such a text-to-world reading? The following points answer
that question, and conclude this chapter:

• I do not try to place the Harry Potter books in terms of a rigorous

definition of ‘fantasy literature’.
• Insofar as the Harry Potter books are usually included in a loosely
defined category of ‘fantasy literature’ this does not entail any
presumption regarding their social and political implications or effects.
In other words, I do not thereby base my analysis of the books on the
expectation that some kind of interrogation or subversion of main-
stream attitudes should be manifest or become desirable. It seems
more reasonable to assume that what may be included in a loosely
defined category of ‘fantasy literature’ may implicitly or explicitly
espouse a range of different and even contradictory politically and

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socially effective perspectives. The particular social and political effects

of the Harry Potter books ultimately depend on their specific state-
ments, contexts and readings, and not on their inclusion in ‘fantasy
literature’ loosely defined.
• It is not especially useful to compare the Harry Potter books with
other works of ‘fantasy literature’ (loosely defined) insofar as under-

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standing social and political effects and implications go – at least no
more useful than it may be to compare these to any work of literature.
However, it may be worth making such comparisons in that there are
broad formal and thematic similarities that form the basis of the
loose definition of ‘fantasy literature’ and these may be usefully
foregrounded for detailed analysis in a comparative fashion.
• Different rigorous understandings of ‘fantasy literature’ (and their
sub-categories), and the inclusion or exclusion of certain texts from
such rigorously defined categories, may follow from a discernment
(or recognition) of the political and social implications and effects of
those texts. In such cases, that rigorously defined understanding of
‘fantasy literature’ would have to be regarded as another social and
political effect of those texts. So, for instance, if it can be demonstrated
that a certain discernment of the social and political effects of the
Harry Potter books have determined whether they have been included
in or excluded from the category of ‘fantasy literature’, then it would
have to be understood that the act of inclusion or exclusion was
itself a social and political effect of the Harry Potter books. This sort of
inclusion or exclusion can then be examined after the fact of the
text-to-world analysis of the Harry Potter books. Naturally, insofar as
this can be shown to have occurred with regard to the Harry Potter
books this matter is of interest in this essay. Indeed the examination
of Pennington’s essay above was conducted on that basis.
• Insofar as exclusion of a loosely defined fantasy text from a rigorously
defined category of ‘fantasy literature’ is understood as one of the
social and political effects of that text, it might be possible to understand
its popularity (which is also a social and political effect) with that
background in mind. In other words, the fact that the Harry Potter
books are immensely popular and the fact that they fit some modes
of inclusion in ‘fantasy literature’ and not others, and that other
books show a similar tendency – and that thereby there seems to
emerge a distinctive category of ‘popular fantasy literature’ – all these
observations constitute the social and political effects of these books,
rather than explain them.

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9
Religious Perspectives

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Let me begin this chapter by acknowledging a personal difficulty (not,
I feel certain, confined to me) in engaging with a particular kind of
apparently serious critical analysis of the relationship between literature
and religion. There are several kinds of analyses that could be mentioned
here before I clarify what that particular kind of analysis is. Substantial
critical effort has been devoted to examining the manner in which
specific religious institutional forms and religious ideologies have impinged
upon the production and reception of literary works in different cultures
and historical periods. Insofar as it is given that the religious institutions
and convictions are such as they are or are such as they have come to
be, and the analysis follows from that background, these are generally
illuminating and useful in various ways. Considerable critical attention
has been devoted to clarifying how religious concerns and issues figure
implicitly or explicitly in literary works, or genres, or the literature of
certain periods and contexts. Sometimes texts that are allocated an
extra-literary and ahistorical religious significance in some context or
the other – those purporting to be divine revelations, for instance – may
nevertheless be historicized and critically analysed as literature; and the
very allocation of religious significance can be assessed as a peculiar
variety of literary reception. Occasionally, serious analysis ponders ana-
logues between processes that are familiar to a theologian (attempting
to get to a mystical truth behind the surface of the world, for instance)
and those that seem to attach to literary criticism itself (attempting to
find a more or less hidden truth behind the surface of the literary text,
for instance). Insofar as I am interested in the social and political effects
of literary works, I have a great deal of sympathy with and interest in
such analytical projects concerned with understading literature from
a religious perspective and vice versa. All these are based on what no one

67

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can deny: that different kinds of religious ideologies and institutions are
inextricably and deeply entwined in the histories and constitutions of
a large number of societies and polities, and therefore in their cultural
expressions, inevitably including literary works. As a matter of thinkingly
engaging with social and political effects of literary works (or of societies
and polities themselves) religion appears as an unavoidable – but not

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subsuming – matter.
It doesn’t need much contemplation to grasp the social and political
significance of religion even in our time. It can be observed that religious
institutions and ideologies continue to play a salutary role (providing aid
and charity where required, often championing emancipatory causes,
occasionally providing necessary social services – education, for example –
in a disinterested fashion, and so on) in some social and political contexts
at the beginning of the twenty first century. It can also be observed that
a range of different religious institutions and ideologies (none need be
singled out, almost all the major world religions are implicated) play an
enormously destructive social and political role in the twenty-first century –
accounting to a great degree for such manifestations of xenophobia and
prejudice, communal hatred and bloodshed, internecine and transnational
conflict, unfreedom and narrow-mindedness as have been witnessed in
the early twenty-first century. A discussion and analysis of the place of
religious institutions and ideologies in our world is, however, no part of
this study, and I don’t take these comments any further. In passing
though, it is material to this study that religious ideologies and institutions
account for the majority of instances of book-banning and literary
censorship in our time – not least with regard to the Harry Potter books.
But back to that particular kind of critical analysis that I have a problem
with: let me give this in terms of examples. Two quotations (chosen, as
before, as exemplifying a particular perspective) would serve to make my
point here. Both belong to studies that examine the relationship between
literature and religion in a reasonably recent (still relevant) context. The
first is taken from the conclusion of David Jasper’s The Study of Literature
and Religion (1989/1992):

The sense of the provisional, and of the possible, the sense of contra-
diction or, in better moments, of vitality, seems to me to be proper
for anyone who is concerned with theology as a living enterprise.
We need continually to be reminded that we undertake our task in
the context of a journey and of change: but it is creative change, and
it is above all the poet in the process of invention who illuminates
for us the nature of God’s mysterious creative redemptive activity. 1

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 Religious Perspectives 69

And the second is taken from the introduction to Graham Ward’s

Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (1996/2000):

This book is not intended . . . for the initiated. It is written for the
interested enquirer; for those in the study of Christian theology
interested in finding a place from which to survey, and appreciate,

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the relevance of contemporary critical theory to that study. The book
is written from a standpoint from within the study of Christian
theology itself. 2

I cannot, despite my desire to engage with the issues that are addressed
in these, actually do so because these declarations have excluded me,
and I understand these declarations as excluding me. I need to explain
that. I have a desire to engage with these books because both, in fact, do
provide useful critical analytical insights along the lines delineated in
the first paragraph of this chapter. I am excluded from such an engage-
ment by the declarations of religious location made in these quotations;
by the performative announcement that makes all the critical analysis
that interests me therein conditional to that declaration. It is the assertion
of that condition as necessary for understanding that foregoing analysis
that excludes me, because if that must be considered necessary then
I haven’t understood the analysis. I can make my exclusion clearer than
that. I do not feel excluded as someone who professes a different religious
faith – though there may be just grounds for that sort of feeling of
exclusion. Graham Ward’s confining of his study and his audience to
not only the field that is covered by ‘an interest in Christian theology’
(that could include an extrinsic interest in Christian theology) but that
is ‘within the study of Christian theology itself’ (which imposes restrictions
as to faith and location) does exclude those of other faiths and locations
than the (perhaps even including some of the manifold varieties of)
Christian theology. Jasper’s open-ended ‘nature of God’s mysterious
creative redemptive activity’ is perhaps less immediately exclusive in that
sense, though persons of certain religious persuasions might feel alienated
by the cultural baggage of monotheism and the specific linguistic asso-
ciations of ‘mystery’, ‘creation’, ‘redemption’. There are these exclusions;
but there is an additional one that is more material to me. There is the
exclusion of the entirely unreligious: those who refuse to espouse religious
conviction or do not recognize any location in terms of religion or find
any desire to be located in terms of religious positions. It is possible that
those who feel excluded on the grounds of belonging to different
religious persuasions may yet feel some affinity to the religious in any

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70 Re-Reading Harry Potter

form (there is that familiar argument that all religions have certain
essential common denominators – for example, in accepting some form of
supernal intelligence and intent, or in allocating a certain centrality to
faith). The exclusion of the unreligious is absolute.
The position of the unreligious is not dissimilar to that presented in
certain philosophical expositions on atheism, agnosticism or freethinking,3

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but for the purposes of this essay I have used ‘unreligious’ in a deliber-
ately distinct fashion. I do not wish to give my position here more
content than is necessary – and those other more familiar terms affili-
ated to my position have a great deal more content (in terms of specific
locations, histories and languages) than is desirable here. Here a briefer
explanation of what my position is should do, an explanation that
would be comprehensible to those who espouse a religious position
(I have no desire to exclude). It consists in the following ideas:

(a) I do not need to justify why I am unreligious any more than I ask or
expect anyone who is religious to justify why they are so. It should
not be inferred from that statement that I am giving an unreligious
perspective the same kind of validity as a religious perspective; that
being unreligious is a kind of (admittedly inverse) religiosity too.
All that statement indicates is that the same latitude that may be
extended to people who claim to be, in whatever way, religious
extends to those who claim to be, in whatever way, not religious.
I can, in fact, justify why I am unreligious (and am convinced that
an unreligious position is more valid than a religious one in every
kind of way) but those who are religious may not accept my reasons;
and equally I have not found myself accepting any justifications of
religiosity that I have been presented with. It is not necessary or
useful, therefore, in this essay to give an exposition of justifications
and scepticisms.
(b) Insofar as I am interested here in the social and political effects of
literary texts (on societies and polities generally) I can understand
why it is imperative that the role of religious institutions and ideolo-
gies be taken into account, but I do not understand why I have to
thereby espouse any religious conviction or location. I do not consider
religious conviction or location to be a necessary background to
political and social engagement, though I recognize that much social
and political engagement has worked on that basis. My political
and social engagement is not based on such a background (though
it recognizes the institutional and ideological importance of religion);
and, if questioned about it, I can come up with several plausible

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 Religious Perspectives 71

reasons why I consider such a background to be socially and

politically undesirable.
(c) I am inevitably excluded by any position that makes analysis
conditional to religious conviction and location; such conditionality
excludes me before I can engage with the argument, makes what
might otherwise be a perfectly comprehensible analysis immediately

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incomprehensible to me. This kind of exclusion cannot be argued
with – it just is exclusion. Since it denies me entry, thought,
argument by its very enunciation I have no choice but to consider
such a demand for espousal of religious conviction or location, or
such a presumptive expectation of religious conviction or location,
as a particularly debilitating kind of unthinkingness – a kind that
cannot be kept aside. An analysis, if it is to be that, cannot start by
excluding: it can be disagreed with, argued against, or dispensed
with after consideration, but it is recognizable as analysis by allowing
for all those possibilities (and all of which are the opposite of exclu-
sion). It is analysis (in this case of social and political effects of
literary works) that my unreligious position enjoins on me.

That, I think, is all I need to declare of my position in this chapter, and

these form the principles which guide my observations on the criticism
of the Harry Potter books from a religious perspective that is available.
As before, I take and treat a particular example as a representative or
typical instance, in this case Richard Abanes’s Harry Potter and the Bible.
This is one of the more extensive treatments of the Harry Potter books
from a religious perspective that is available at the time of writing this, 4
has a scholarly appearance, and expresses ostensible social and political
concerns. Moreover, it has the advantage of being the most systematic
and analytical presentation of the religious position (most conten-
tiously associated with religious perspectives apropos the Harry Potter
books now) from which some sort of censorship can be contemplated.
I have not chosen a critical work that endorses the Harry Potter books
from a religious perspective because: (a) I haven’t found any that lay
out the critical presumptions of the religious perspective rigorously or
examine the Harry Potter books in those terms sufficiently; (b) because
I am interested in the analytical justifications that are called upon in
censoring the Harry Potter books as a matter of course (that is, I have
observed above, one of the significant social and political effects of these
books).
Abanes’s book deliberately and systematically excludes certain per-
spectives (especially mine as outlined above) and therefore limits

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72 Re-Reading Harry Potter

engagement with such analysis as it produces. In trying to retrieve an

analytical or thinking perspective from within it, in trying to make
some sense of it from my perspective, I necessarily have to read it
against the grain of its expectations and rhetoric. In itself it is not just
indifferent to any but a particular variety of Christian perspective for its
analytical communication, it removes itself from any attempt at

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analytical communication to any but Christians. The emphasis on the
conditionality of its arguments to its declarations of faith is absolute – in
this it is characteristic of almost all critical examinations of the Harry
Potter books from a religious perspective, approbatory or otherwise, that
I have come across – and before I try an against-the-grain retrieval of its
analytical procedures from an unreligious perspective, it is instructive
to take note of Abanes’s mode of expressing this conditionality. The Bible
is not used simply as a normative text or the ‘Biblical’ as pertaining to
perspectives that are laid out in that text: that does naturally happen,
and on several counts textual quotation from The Bible are given law-like
or norm-like validity to demonstrate, for instance and most extensively,
that the occult is undesirable5 or that certain moral positions are unac-
ceptable. 6 More importantly though, the ‘Biblical’ is not just a textual
referent, it is often used in an adjectival fashion that suggests that it is
a self-expressive quality, as in ‘patently unbiblical’ or ‘biblically speaking’
(with the small ‘b’). It is, in other words, normalized in language usage
with the same kind of effect as terms like ‘truthful’, ‘analytical’,
‘rational’, ‘speculative’, ‘optimistic’, etc. might be. And, beyond the lin-
guistic normalization of the Biblical by drawing it into the unthinking
instrumental use of language, there are those explicit statements of faith.
These are not merely moments when faith is declared which can be
passed over without giving them too much attention; these are grating
in their assertiveness, and are given as a priori to such historical perspec-
tive and logical inference as this critical work draws upon. This is
especially true when Abanes introduces the second part of his book
with a sweeping historical overview of Viking, Persian and Hebrew
mythological representations of good and evil, and moves rapidly on to
the following:

This universal knowledge of explaining the presence of sin in the

world dates back to the very beginning of time, to a place called the
Garden of Eden. There, the Bible tells us, God created the first human;
namely, Adam, who was made from the dust of the earth (Genesis
2:7), and Eve, who was fashioned by God from a portion of bone
taken from Adam’s side (2:21–2) . . .7

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 Religious Perspectives 73

The manner in which the culturally-specific mythology becomes

‘universal knowledge’, and this universal knowledge is given through
the Christian mythology without any awareness of the culture-specificity
of the latter, and the manner in which the Christian mythology is given
as not really mythological at all but as more or less historical (smacking
of anti-evolutionary Creationism), all ensure that the conditionality

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from Abanes’s faith is determinedly exclusionary.
Why bother to dwell on this then? Despite the taint of bigotry (behind
all the apparent scholarship and critical logic) in this book – this sort of
exclusionism amounts to bigotry – there is a valuable observation that
an against-the-grain reading of this provides, which is relevant to much
of the criticism of Harry Potter books from religious perspectives. The
observation is straightforward: to approach the Harry Potter novels seriously
from a religious perspective these works of fiction have to be given an efficacy
and relevance that is as ‘real’ and contingent as that which is found in reli-
gious texts and statements of religious doctrine. For Abanes, the Harry Potter
novels are worthy of censure because they derive from and present
a world-view that is as ‘real’ and potent as the Christian world-view. It
is because this is the case that the Harry Potter world-view can be construed
as a substantial enemy of the Christian world-view; in some all too
material sense it is dangerous to the truth of Christianity as Abanes
understands it because it is as ‘real’ itself as Christianity is to believers.
There is a competition for efficacy and territory, if Abanes’s analysis is
to be understood, between the world that devolves from believing The
Bible and that which is inferred from the suspected beliefs that underlie
Harry Potter books; and one can only win at the expense of the other
(the logic of censorship is self-evident). What Abanes says in brief is:
Christianity is the truly good; Harry Potter represents something that is
equally truly bad. They belong to the same realm of convictions and
effects. The equally ‘real’, but perniciously anti-Christian, potency of
the Harry Potter books is presented by Abanes through a range of different
arguments. It is suggested by the manner in which the alleged immorality
of the Harry Potter novels is demonstrated by the normative enunci-
ations of what is moral in The Bible. This effectively also suggests that the
Harry Potter books are as definitively and normatively immoral as the
Biblical statements are moral. A great deal of effort is expended by Abanes
on demonstrating that some of the names in the Potter books are based
on those of real historical personages; that some of the described events
and phenomena are drawn from sources that attest to the ‘reality’ of such
events and phenomena in the past; that there are some people involved
in what they consider ‘real’ occult activity in our world who take the

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Potter books seriously (such practices and practitioners are described

with immense seriousness by Abanes); and that it is possible that Rowling
believes in the occult herself (the ambiguity in several of her statements
is dwelt upon). Abanes’s argument as a whole is, therefore, two-fold: one,
that the Harry Potter books are based on an occult world-view which
is potentially as effective and certainly as much based on ‘reality’ as

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a Christian world-view is; and two, that the Christian world-view and
the occult Harry Potter world-view consequently cannot coexist. There are
here two more or less equally ‘real’ world-views in competition.
Other arguments which also draw upon religious texts and practices
(such as those gestured towards in some parts of a book by Elizabeth
D. Schafer,8 for instance, which Abanes clearly dislikes intensely) could
however be envisaged which present quite different possibilities. If it is
argued, for example, that the Harry Potter books should be read as
symbolically playing with the same concerns as, say, The Bible read also
as a symbolic text, then the conditionality on faith becomes immaterial.
To see The Bible as bearing symbolic meanings, and to make that the
basis of assessing the symbolic meanings of other texts, is a process that
may appeal especially to the religious but does not require any a priori
and exclusionary faith. Such a method attests to no more than the ‘reality’
of symbolic connotations in any text, literary or religious, and recognizes
the social and political significance that is allocated to texts in different
contexts. In such a methodology the kind of excess of significance that
some believers may attribute to a religious text, and the truth of the values
that believers may discern within it, are no more than that religious
text’s social and political effect; at any rate those of other faiths, and even
the unreligious, may engage with such a critical approach without being
excluded. But there hasn’t been much systematic criticism of the Harry
Potter books along these lines.
Much of the criticism of the Harry Potter books from a religious perspec-
tive has been in an Abanes mould, presenting the practices of witchcraft
and occult as some sort of competitive force which Christians must fight
to determine who controls the terrain. Both exist and clash with each
other at the same level of ‘reality’. From an unreligious point of view,
such critical efforts seem to throw religious texts and statements of
doctrine as much into the realm of the fanciful and imaginary as the
Harry Potter books; belief in a Christian world-view seems no more ‘real’
than belief in a magical world-view. Both seem equally ephemeral and
removed from our world of understandable social and political effects.

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10
Locations and Limitations

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I have argued above that the Harry Potter books have had certain significant
social and political effects, of which their enormous sales (to readers across
age boundaries), their effortless reach across cultural and linguistic
borders, and the unease they have aroused among certain (primarily
religious) ideologically defined groups are symptoms. If these social and
political effects haven’t been seriously analysed and studied – if hesitation
and doubt about the need for such analysis and study has been mooted –
it is only because the reading of Harry Potter books has generally, sometimes
deliberately, been unthinking. I have presented arguments against this
sort of general readerly unthinkingness, and maintained that for the sake
of analysis it is sensible to assume that the Harry Potter books exercise
their social and political effects essentially on and through adults. I have
also observed that it is possible for those who engage with any book
with analytical rigour and critical seriousness as a matter of course, i.e.
institutionally sanctioned literary critics and interpreters, are also capable
of making unthinking decisions and judgements – and that this has
been the case for those who have engaged with the Harry Potter books
more often than not. I have enumerated the kind of unthinking decisions
and judgements that critics have attached to the Harry Potter books by
looking at four distinct critical ways of dealing with them: as reflecting
the author’s views, as ‘children’s literature’, as ‘fantasy literature’, and in
relation to religious perspectives. As against these approaches, I have
delineated a critical methodology that would enable me to make
a serious and analytical text-to-world study of the Harry Potter books
with a view to discerning their social and political effects. With these
observations and clarifications behind me it is now almost time for me
to actually get down to that task – after a couple of final points to end
this Part are made.

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In going through the above it might occur to some careful readers

that while I have said something about the kinds of unthinking and
thinking, unconsidered and analytical, light-hearted and serious readings
that are possible with regard to literary texts, I have not been precise
about where in the process of reading these distinctions take place, or how
in the course of readings do one or the other of these float up to the

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surface. In effect I have also not been clear about where and how in the
process of reading do social and political effects intervene and emanate
from. These are, of course, rather technical queries which are unlikely
to make much of a difference to the above observations or to the text-
to-world reading that I go on to; after all both these depend not on the
where and the how of the reading process, but on the recognition that
the reading process takes place with different nuances and discernments.
It is not, therefore, necessary for me to dwell on the how and the where
of the reading process in detail. However, curiosity is generally worth
addressing, and this is the place to do so in a brief and indicative (rather
than exhaustive and demonstrative) fashion. To do so then, let me first
summarize three familiar models for understanding the process of reading,
which, as the cognoscenti would know, are massive simplifications of the
detailed and painstaking theories of Iser, Fish, and Wilson and Sperber
respectively.1 These are not necessarily compatible with each other
(though there are obvious overlaps) and could be thought of as alternative
models to understand the same process.

Model 1: Every literary text gives only a limited amount of linguistic

information about the plot, characters, perspectives, scenes, events,
ideas, emotions, etc. that it presents or addresses. This is inevitable – to
give a complete account of these or to present any of these in an exhaustive
fashion could be a very protracted, perhaps even inexhaustible, enter-
prise. Unavoidably, therefore, what the reader of a literary text faces are
selected bits of information ordered in a particular fashion, in the midst
of which there would necessarily exist certain gaps or blanks, certain
contradictions and negations. Indeed, the literary quality of the text
may depend on how these blanks and gaps, contradictions and neg-
ations are used to manipulate the reader, to make the reader aware of the
text as being a text, an artefact. What the reader does when faced with
these is to try to make coherent sense of these: she fills in the blanks or
gaps, imagines certain ways in which the negations or contradictions
may cease to be so, and so on; in other words she engages in trying to
make the text consistent. In attempting this she would naturally draw
upon her own understanding of how the world is ordered and lived, her

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own experiences and associations, her own sense of the conventions

that attach to literary texts, perhaps her investigations into the context
in which the text was produced and received, etc. Even if she is unable
to resolve certain blanks and gaps or contradictions and negations in
this fashion – so that she has to, say, conclude that these are simply part
of the literary design of the text and have to be taken as such – this con-

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clusion would still rest on her effort in the first instance to resolve them.

Model 2: All readers (all persons actually) inevitably belong to a number

of communities. Thus all readers would, for instance, be part of a linguistic
group (speaking a specific language), would adhere to certain cultural
norms (therefore to a cultural group), be identified with a social class (in
some sense belong to it), understood to be a member of certain employing
institutions (be part of that institutional community), be part of an
age-group, a gender-group, and so on. Each of these affiliations involve
certain agreements with the group in question about how the world
should be lived in and understood; or, in other words, each of these
affiliations provide certain interpretive strategies which enable the reader
to make sense of whatever she encounters and negotiates with. This is
also the case when the reader encounters and negotiates with a literary
text. In addition to all the above, the act of encountering and negotiating
with a literary text may entail interpretive strategies which are agreed
upon by communities which are devoted to reading (say, a group of
professional literary critics, or students in literature classrooms, etc.). Such
complexes of agreements, or interpretive strategies, enable the reader to
start reading a literary text with some expectation of making sense of it,
and would determine whatever sense she does make of it in the process
of reading. It is therefore impossible to separate the text from all the
interpretive strategies that the reader inevitably brings with her. The
process of reading can happen only because of these, and texts exist
within, so to say, such interpretive strategies and do not exist without. So
all that can really be examined is the manner in which interpretive
strategies work on certain texts, and it is pointless to try to figure out
how texts direct reading by qualities that are innate to them (such as
blanks, gaps, etc.).

Model 3: The process of reading is essentially a process of receiving

a series of linguistic signals. Each bit of a literary text that is read, or the
reception of each particular signal, could make sense and be understood
in a wide variety of different ways. What the reader does at each
moment of reading is make an assessment of the sense that is most

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relevant at that moment and accept that as the predominant sense of

that bit of the text. This assessment consists in a determination of
which shade of meaning, which sense, has the most contextual effects;
i.e. can have an effect of some sort on the maximum number of differ-
ent considerations and observations that happen to be in the reader’s
mind – or her field of perceptions – at that moment. What happens to

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be in the reader’s mind at that moment depends on a range of different
things: on who is the reader (what sort of experiences she has had, what
sort of books she has read, what her memories are, etc.), where she is
located, what is happening in the world around her, and also, of course,
on what had happened in all the bits of text she had read before that
particular bit, and how she had assessed their contextual effects. As she
moves on to the next bit of text, the sense she had identified as being
most relevant for the previous bit would become part of the context
that would be in her mind, and in determining how this new bit of the
text is relevant she would take that into account. Sometimes this might
involve an adjustment of all her previous assessments; and in the pro-
cess the determination of the most relevant sense of every subsequent
bit of the text may become easier. So the process of reading involves
essentially a constant series of assessments and determinations of rele-
vance in terms of contextual effects, which may involve adjustments
and readjustments of previous assessments and determinations, and in
which the text itself, the reader, the world around her, and processes of
linguistic communication, are all implicated.

What a cursory look at these models makes clear is that these cannot be
considered to be processes that readers can be aware of in the act of
reading. Reading is too quick for readers to be able to go through any of
these processes in a well-considered and fully thought out fashion.
We must assume that some such process occurs very quickly, almost
spontaneously or unconsciously, when we read. In that sense all reading
is unthinking, at least in the first instance. The best we can do is look
back after an initial reading and consider how some such process has
operated in that reading and resulted in certain effects, and then consider
how we feel about those effects. A thinking reading could be thought
of as this effort to reconstruct what had happened in the unthinking
process of reading: a thinking reading is a kind of retrospective reconstruc-
tion of the kind of things that might have happened in the initial unthinking
reading. The process of conducting this retrospective reconstruction could
be thought of as a critical analysis of the reading of a particular text.
The pertinacity with and detail in which we undertake such a retrospect-
ive reconstruction could determine the degree of thinkingness that is

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 Locations and Limitations 79

going into such analysis (reading can, I have already maintained, mani-
fest different degrees of thinkingness and unthinkingness) – and the
determination to carry out such a retrospective reconstruction can be
thought of as a measure of our seriousness as readers with regard to a
particular text.
It seems to me that the three models of understanding the process

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of reading outlined above are all equally plausible theoretical retro-
spective reconstructions of the general process of reading themselves,
and are all therefore equally useful in retrospective reconstructions
(serious critical analyses) of specific readings of specific literary texts.
That is the strength of each of the models, and that no doubt is why
it has proved difficult to decide which of these models is best or closest
to the truth of the reading process, despite their apparent incompati-
bility with each other. Which model we might choose for such specific
critical analysis (if not consciously, at least by implication) is therefore
not guided so much by the superior strength of one model or the other
(or our convictions in the truth of one or the other) as by conven-
ience. I think it can be demonstrated that to some extent all these
models come into play in critical analyses of specific readings of specific
texts.
Whichever of the above models for understanding the process of
reading one might feel attracted to there is an unavoidable common
denominator: each of them involve the wider world in which the text
(any text) and the reader (or readers) in question are located. In each
case the process of reading is intricately interwoven with apprehensions
of the world at various levels, certainly at levels that are larger than
merely the purely subjective mind of the reader or any pristinely con-
crete location of a literary text. No apprehension of the world at some
level can be a matter of complete indifference for critical analysis of
specific readings and texts, though some critical analysts may chose as
a matter of convenience not to address certain kinds of apprehension,
or otherwise delimit the part of the world which they wish to be
conscious of in their analyses. Reading, at any rate, however thinking or
unthinking, unconsidered or analytical, light-hearted or serious, implicates
a world-view – what matters in how determined we might be to be
aware of that. It is here that the social and political effects intervene in
and devolve from the reading of texts. Reading literary texts involve
social and political effects; these social and political effects have degrees
(as outlined in Chapter 4) and the degree can be gauged by certain
symptoms (popularity, ideological unease, etc.); and these social and
political effects can either simply be left at the level of effects, uncon-
sciously absorbed and perpetuated, or they can be analysed by looking

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80 Re-Reading Harry Potter

closely at the process through and from which they emerge – that of
reading texts. Such an analysis is itself a retrospective reconstruction of
reading that may use one or the other or any combination or all of the
above models, with an awareness of the social and political world in
which texts and readers are located and therefore with the expectation
that some clarification of social and political effects will follow from

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such analysis. This is the raison d’être of my text-to-world reading of the
Harry Potter books with a view to discerning their social and political
effects. I don’t think the above theoretical observations need have any
further or more explicit bearing on the process of my attempting this.
These clarifications leave me with the final, but in many ways most
crucial, consideration of this first Part. This is best broached in terms of
a question. I have devoted considerable space to demonstrating the ways
in which unthinkingness characterizes much of the obvious-sounding
general responses to, and creeps even into apparently analytical and
rigorous critical readings of, the Harry Potter books. I have developed
these arguments in the course of charting out a methodology that, I hope,
would help me guard against those particular kinds of unthinkingness,
and produce a serious and analytical text-to-world reading of these books
in Part II. Do I then believe that my reading is some sort of ideal and
final understanding of the social and political effects of the Harry Potter
books, and that my reading would be immune to any unthinking
element itself, and embody the serious and the analytical?
It would be indefensibly and inexcusably arrogant of me to imply
that. I don’t at all wish to suggest anything of the kind. The kinds of
unthinkingness that I have discussed above, and resolutions that I have
made in view of my awareness of them, may help me to avoid those
particular kinds of unthinkingness because I have brought them to
awareness, so to say. But there probably are, inevitably must be, meth-
odological and conceptual implications within my own method that
I have not brought to awareness. Perhaps such manifestations of my
own unthinkingness would suddenly dawn on me sometime in the
future, perhaps the readers of this study would spot them and bring
them to light. These may be relatively mild instances of unthinkingness
that affect some of my observations and leave others unaffected; or these
may be serious oversights that may undermine the whole argument (that
would be failure). I do not know at the moment; I have not thought of
them yet, otherwise I could avoid them. More pertinently though, even
if the kinds of unthinkingness that may be discovered in my reading in
Part II may not be too heinous, the resultant reading still cannot be
considered to be in any way conclusive. The critical choices that underlie

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 Locations and Limitations 81

the retrospective reconstruction of my reading, that effectively forms

my thinking analysis of the Harry Potter books, could be drawn from at
least three plausible and consistent but mutually incompatible models
of reading – and there may well be others. There would always be other
critical choices possible, that may just make things look different, or draw
unexpected attention to related material that I had not considered, and

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therefore bring new insights. Maybe my effort at a thinking reading is
no more than an unthinking step in a long process that reaches towards
an approximate and ever-shifting idea of a conclusive analysis. I don’t
expect any magical revelations.

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 Part II

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Reading the Harry Potter Novels

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11
Three Worlds

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The Harry Potter books play deliberately and self-consciously with three
worlds: the Magic world, the Muggle world, and (I qualify this soon)
our world. I have mentioned this in Chapter 8. The manner in which
the three worlds are juxtaposed against each other and give point to
each other is worth teasing out further. Which of the three worlds, we
might ask ourselves, is central, and why? It is an innocuous-sounding
question, but the answer is not as obvious as it might initially appear
to be.
The Magic and Muggle worlds are overtly presented in the books; our
world is implied through both those worlds. It is clear that the Muggle
world is in some mechanistic sense coextensive with our world (by and
large the same laws of physics apply, for instance); the Muggle world
and our world are immediately distinguished by the fact that the one is
clearly presented within the books and the other is only implied (there
are other more material distinctions which I clarify soon). The Magic world
and our world are apparently different in the same way as the Muggle
world and the Magic world are different, and yet there seem to exist
preoccupations and systems in the Magic world which are so similar to
our world (though not Muggle world) as to occasionally suggest that the
Magic world is simply some sort of indirect commentary on our world.
I examine these relations between our world and the Magic and Muggle
worlds later in this chapter. As regards the juxtaposition of the Muggle
world and the Magic world, the space given to the former in each of the
books – usually a few chapters at the beginning of each and then
intermittently at second hand – is obviously less than that given to the
latter. By dint of quantity of attention given the Magic world certainly
appears to be the focal point. It is possible to give more substance to
that superficial quantitative observation. There are two ways in which the

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86 Re-Reading Harry Potter

Muggle world is presented: (a) substantively, or in terms of what it

contains, which boils down mainly to the Dursley household; and
(b) referentially, or in terms of its relation to various aspects of the
Magic world. The substantive aspect of the Muggle world is presented in
a contrary fashion to the referential aspect. Substantively, the Muggle
world, reflected through the microcosm of the Dursley household, is

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aware of the Magic world but chooses to disregard or shun it; referen-
tially, the Magic world deliberately locates itself in the interstices of the
Muggle world, and works hard to ensure that the Muggle world is not
aware of it. Quite a lot of the Harry Potter books are devoted to gleefully
elaborating these relationships and exploiting the contradictions.
As the main substantive element of the Muggle world, the Dursley
household is bound to appear to represent something general about the
Muggle world at large, and whatever the Dursleys represent about the
Muggle world is not pleasant. If I try to understand what the Dursleys
represent about the Muggle world in general (and not at the moment in
relation to our world) the following come to mind. The Dursleys represent
a Muggle desire to reside in a causally explicable world, and simultan-
eously some sort of Muggle revulsion or fear at all that is not causally
explicable. The Dursleys’ reactions to Harry’s unconscious magical feats
early in Stone are instructive. When, for instance, Aunt Petunia fails in her
efforts to keep Harry’s hair short (it magically grows overnight when
cut) he is punished: ‘He had been given a week in the cupboard for this,
even though he had tried to explain that he couldn’t explain how it had
grown back so quickly’ (Stone 23). Similarly, when she attempts to get
Harry to use one of Dudley’s old jumpers and it magically shrinks:
‘Aunt Petunia had decided it must have shrunk in the wash and, to his
great relief, Harry wasn’t punished’ (Stone 23). In each of these instances
the Dursleys’ attempt to find a, patently misplaced, cause. Allocating
blame is one way of finding the cause: the fact that such a discovery of
the cause is not an explanation (as Harry protests) is, of course, self-evident –
but then finding a cause itself is halfway there. To get rid of the inexpli-
cable by extirpating the ostensible cause is not an entirely irrational
idea if the inexplicable is considered unpalatable. That, for instance, can
be the rationale for certain kinds of medical practice: if we can find
certain bacteria causing a disease we don’t necessarily have to explain
how the bacteria does this (though it might become more feasible at that
point to do so), we can concentrating on finding ways of getting rid of
the bacteria. The Dursleys regard the inexplicable as unpalatable just by
being inexplicable (for them Harry, like his mother, is a freak [Stone 44],
an abnormality [Chamber 8]) – inexplicability is a disease. In the second

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instance both a cause and an explanation are found and Harry is left
alone.
The desire to live in a causally explicable world and the revulsion of
the inexplicable in themselves do not characterize the Dursleys as, let’s
say, the only Muggles of the Muggle world whom we have an opportunity
to examine at any length. They suffer from two kinds of disadvantages

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in this context. One, the genuinely and unremittingly inexplicable –
magical – simply exists and they believe it exists, so the best they can
really do is either try to pretend it is not there or try to erase it, or
alternatively to accept their own bafflement and impotence (it is not
insignificant that the Dursleys also live in fear of Harry). Two, because
they believe magic exists they do not have the conviction to deal with the
inexplicable in any other way: Mr. Dursley cannot, for example, appeal
to a scientist to investigate Harry’s abilities and find an explanation. In
this Muggle world nothing as mundane as scientific research and analysis
exists, not even in the consciousness of Muggles. It is because they believe
magic exists, and in fact magic does exist, that the Dursleys’ desire for
causal explanations and revulsion of the inexplicable becomes a kind of
blindness, their attempts to extirpate the ostensible causes are perverse
and brutal, their conception of normality appears arbitrary. The unpleas-
antness of the Dursleys is a condition of their world: their beliefs are
unpleasant and oppressive because they patently don’t fit into the Muggle
world that they are made to inhabit. The Muggle world that is presented
exists as complementing the Magic world; in it magic can be manifested and
causal explanations cannot always apply; magic is apparent as magic because
it defeats the desires and sharpens the explanatory failures of Muggles; the
Muggle world and the Magic world are mutually definitive.
What sort of world is it where the desire for explanations and revulsion
of the inexplicable are both undercut by a belief in the magical (and
therefore, in some sense, the existence of the magical), devolving into
arbitrary acts of brutality and helplessness that arise from that contra-
diction? In Prisoner the Muggle world of the Dursleys (or at least the
Dursleys’ view of it, but then what other view is there?) is characterized
as ‘medieval’: ‘[The Dursleys] were Muggles, and they had a very medieval
attitude towards magic’ (Prisoner 8). Some reviewers had wondered whether
this wasn’t a slip-up; if the Dursleys represent those who don’t accept
magic then they shouldn’t be thought of as medieval, since historically
medieval people had accepted the possibility of magic. But this objection
is entirely off the point: the Dursleys are correctly characterized as
medieval because they do believe in magic and yet do not wish to
entertain it, try to get rid of the ostensible causes in a brutal and

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exterminatory fashion, and actually the Muggle world they are in is

medieval insofar as magic exists in it. That there is no slip-up here is
evident because on the previous page what the medieval period charac-
terizes is lucidly described in a quotation from one of Harry’s textbooks,
A History of Magic:

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Non-magic people (more commonly known as Muggles) were particularly
afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognising it. On
the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no
effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing
Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling
sensation. (Prisoner 7)

This is interesting in all sorts of ways. If magic did really exist then the
witch-burnings of the Spanish Inquisition or during the Salem witch-hunts
could almost be justified. The quotation presents such acts of witch-
burning as being laughably absurd, and focuses on the failure of recog-
nition as the main problem here. Witch-burning (unless the victim was
mistakenly not a witch) would be an understandable and quite possibly
harmless exercise. From the medieval point of view the people’s beliefs
and fears and contradictory desires made the witch-burnings under-
standable insofar as they were convinced that witches were being burnt.
The Dursleys are no more or less understandable than medieval people
in that they do essentially believe in magic and wish it were not there
and fear it; and as it happens their fears and beliefs are justified to some
extent because they do live in a medieval world where magic can
become manifest from a complementary Magic world. And magic is, of
course, dangerous to Muggles – that, at any rate, is amply evidenced in
the Harry Potter books and needs no demonstration.
Let me take a different tack and try to pin down something of the
referential aspect of the Muggle world. A great deal of space is devoted
in the Harry Potter books to making the Magic world exist in the interstices
of the Muggle world so that it doesn’t interfere in the Muggle world too
blatantly. This conveys a different impression of the Muggle world from
that which obtains from an examination of the Dursley household. The
entry into the magical Diagon Alley is hidden behind an innocuous and
unobtrusive pub, the Leaky Cauldron; the entry to the Hogwarts Express
is precisely between platforms 9 and 10 of King’s Cross Station (very
precisely at nine and three-quarters); the Improper Use of Magic Office
(from whom Harry gets a warning in Chamber) and Misuse of Muggle
Artefacts Office (where Mr. Weasley is employed) in the Ministry of

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 Three Worlds 89

Magic are devoted to ensuring that magical acts and objects do not
intrude upon the Muggle world; memory-modifying spells are used on
Muggles extensively for that end; large magical edifices like the Hogwarts
School itself or the Quidditch World Cup Stadium are secreted away
from Muggles by spells; Portkeys are created for mass entry into the
Quidditch World Cup Stadium from unobtrusive Muggle objects; and

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so on. A great deal of effort is expended by the Magic world, in other
words, to ensure that the illusion of what is normal and explicable in
Muggle terms is maintained in the Muggle world. In fact, it probably
won’t be inaccurate to say that what Muggles understand to be normal and
explicable, and the norms and explanations in accordance with which Muggles
conduct their lives, are to a very large extent the creation of the Magic world – it
is not Muggles who determine the condition of their world but Magic people
who do so in a benign and Muggle-friendly fashion, by making the Magic world
invisible.
The substantive and referential ways in which the Muggle world is
presented in the Harry Potter books with regard to the Magic world leads
to an inevitable conclusion. The Muggle world is presented within the
embrace of the Magic world, and presented so as to draw the reader
away from it and into the Magic world. Substantively, the Muggle world –
mainly the Dursleys – is a marginal space from which the reality and
pre-eminence of the Magic world in Muggle terms is affirmed. Referen-
tially, the Muggle world is itself no more than a construction that exists
(precariously) at the behest of Magic world. The Muggle world is, in brief,
a kind of focalizing device that enables readers to bring the Magic world
into sharper view; a knob on the readerly telescope that is directed at
the Magic world.
But, the question remains, why should this focusing on the Magic
world be of interest to readers who are squarely located in, let’s say, our
(or their, the distinction is immaterial at the moment) world, whose
location and existence within our world impinges inevitably on their
reading and engagement with the Magic world? It is, I hope, under-
stood that by ‘our world’ I am referring to a phenomenal and a (despite
the singular and abstract air of that phraseology) pluralistic world – a
happening world, the world of political and social effects, the world out
there (empirically apprehensible), all the different worlds that all the
different readers experience and understand and live in, etc. (socio-
logists usefully call it the ‘life-world’). Insofar as I refer to a particular
reading (mine at the moment) and analysis of the Harry Potter books
I can be more concrete about what I mean by ‘our world’: I mean some-
thing like the world in which political and social effects take place and

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are perceived from the vantage point of being in Britain. I have a prag-
matic understanding that the perception from Britain, while presenting
certain culturally specific aspects (usefully dwelt on by Andrew Blake), 1
is such as can extend outside that domain and can be communicated to
other domains; and that those taking place in other domains can be
understood (with perhaps some limitations) in this. I do not emphasize

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the British domain too much then (unlike Blake) and optimistically
address ‘our world’, but mention it nevertheless to be cognisant of my
limitations and specificities. Of what interest is the Magic world, con-
joint with and focalized through the Muggle world, to readers in our
world? When I ask myself that question I naturally, given the specific
emphasis of this study, think of our world in terms of social and political
effects. So what I am really asking is, why does a series of books which
essentially present a Magic world appeal to readers in the world of social
and political effects, so much so as to become a significant socially and
politically effective phenomenon itself?
It is possible to think of the Muggle world insofar as it is presented as
being relevant to our world (generally speaking) in certain ways by
itself. The following quotation from a review of the Harry Potter books
attempts this:

Themes of personal and emotional security and the welfare of vulner-

able groups and individuals – at the death knell of ‘welfarism’ and big
government in a context where familiar institutions are under strain
and are being reconstituted (often almost beyond recognition) – res-
onate throughout the series. At a crude allegorical level, the Dursleys,
Harry’s Muggle guardians, his aunt, uncle, and cousin – stand in for
the mean-spirited and small-minded neoliberal state with its minimal
safety net and admonitions for personal responsibility enunciated from
the moral high ground of the center right.2

This is suggestive but ultimately far-fetched. It is suggestive in that if we

impose such allegorical significance on the Dursleys and if that is how
we understand the neoliberal state, then there are certain moral evalu-
ations available about both. But it is limited in that the grounds for
doing either are not self-evident and not given in the review: there is
little in the Harry Potter books to suggest that the Dursleys should be
understood in this fashion, and one needs a rigorous grasp of specific
political contexts (in our world) and political ideologies to take that
position on the neoliberal state. More importantly though, even if that
allegorical significance is imposed on the Dursleys (and therefore on

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 Three Worlds 91

such of the Muggle world as is presented) then it must imply some

allegorical significance on the Magic world, given the manner in which
these worlds are related. The whole organization of the Muggle world
with relation to the Magic world is such that any particular political or
social significance given to the former would have to rebound in some
fashion into the latter.

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Insofar as the above question goes, I suppose it may be maintained
that the Magic world that the Harry Potter books focus on appeal to readers
in our world, and are the centre of a socially and politically effective
phenomenon, because that Magic world is removed from our world,
deliberately distanced from social and political aspects of our world. If
that were true that itself would constitute a socially and politically
effective position, and one curious enough to be ever more worthy of
analysis. But I do not think it is true. I do not think (and I have argued
this in Part I) that any literary work can be so removed from the social
and political world, especially those that are at the centre of phenomena
such as that brought about by the Harry Potter books. More specifically,
it seems to me obvious that the Magic world that these books focus on
is deliberately and self-consciously used to play with, allude to, comment
on, interrogate and take positions with regard to social and political issues
that are relevant to our world. It is very likely that that is why these
books engage a wide variety of readers to such an extraordinary degree,
however unthinking that engagement might be. It also seems to me to be
likely that such engagement is often unthinking, in the senses delineated
in Part I, because it is in the Magic world that our world is so self-
consciously treated, and not in the Muggle world. The Muggle world
seems to be akin to our world, and when the Muggle world is countered
by the Magic world we may feel that we are withdrawing from our world.
But the Muggle world is not akin to our world except in a shallow mech-
anistic way (I go into this at greater length later): the Muggle world is
a ‘medieval’ world in Potter-speak, and only there to complement the
Magic world, and our world does neither and we know it. The Magic
world is the repository of reflections on our world that insidiously or
overtly draws us in, makes us engage in it, while seeming not to.
There are several obvious areas in which the ongoing concerns of our
social and political world are played out in the wizard world. Some of
these are:

• The nature of kinship, and the social and political significance of

bloodlines;
• The exercise of power between different social groups and individuals;

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• The constructions of gender, and the characteristics of sexual desire;

• Consumerism and advertisement;
• The nature of human rationality.

There are, of course, other analogous features between our world and
the Magic world that the Harry Potter books play with, but these are the

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ones that I focus on in this essay. In discussing each of these I chart out
the precise ways in which the analogues between Magic world and our
world are suggested, the manner in which the issue in question is dealt
with in the presentation of Magic world, and the implications this mode
of dealing with the issue in question has if it is assumed to operate similarly
in our world. That forms the substance of my text-to-world analysis of
the Harry Potter books to discern their social and political effects. I draw
my observations regarding these issues together finally by dwelling on the
underlying discreteness of the Magic world and our world, and returning
to the unthinking quality of the Harry Potter phenomenon (squarely in
our world).
That is my larger programme with regard to these books; and I get down
to it as soon as I go through two relevant formal observations that occupy
the next two (brief) chapters.

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12
Repetition and Progression

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It has been rightly observed by several critics that the Harry Potter books
have a repetitive structure, and that each of them follows a similar
sequence of events with a similar outcome. Schafer sums up the repetitive
structure of each of the books as ‘offering a happy ending complete
with a vanquished archenemy, restoration of the status quo, and recog-
nition of Harry’s prowess’1 and maintains that the repetitive structure is
comforting to the reader. Zipes is also struck by the ‘conventionality,
predictability, and happy ends despite the clever turns of phrase and
surprising twists in the intricate plots’ 2 of the Harry Potter books, and
also believes that this helps its popularity, but wonders belligerently
why this utter predictability should be so universally admired. In broad
structure Schafer’s summary of what occurs in these books is, of course,
accurate but it is also undoubtedly set off by the progression from one
book and to the other. Interestingly the progression, which is woven
through the repetition, is of a particular sort; and equally the repetition,
which underlies the progression, has some peculiar features.
The repetition in the Harry Potter books is not simply the familiar
variations-on-a-theme sort of repetition that is found in detective fiction
series (all Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple books, for
instance, or Simenon’s Inspector Maigret stories) or spy fiction series
(Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, for example). In these some unchan-
ging common denominators (usually a hero and his or her sidekicks) and
the essentially similar structure of the series (a demonstration of the hero’s
abilities) are offset only by changes in the sequence of events, settings,
characters, etc. in the constituent volumes so that little significant pro-
gression between them can be perceived. Each particular book of such
a series is independent and complete in itself, and is linked to the others
primarily by the unchanging common denominators and structural

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similarity. With growing familiarity with the series what the reader may
look for in each new volume is how the predictable structure is varied
and yet retained.
The progression in the Harry Potter books is also not merely of the
familiar consequent-phases sort that is found in innumerable literary
trilogies and quartets (and so on). In these generally certain common

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denominators (a particular setting, certain central characters) are
developed in a linear or chronological fashion through each subsequent
book of the series. In such series the sense of closure in each volume is
diluted by the progression towards the next. With growing familiarity
with the series the reader is unlikely to feel entitled to predict with any
certainty how the subsequent volume will develop, and would hope to
discover how the common denominators change and/or adapt as cir-
cumstances change. The emphasis is on the progression between constitu-
ent volumes in such series.
On the face of it, the variations-on-a-theme kind of repetition and the
consequent-phases kind of progression do not seem to be compatible. It
would appear to be a tricky act to both maintain a predictable structure
involving certain common denominators (a particular setting, certain
central characters) and yet also to have these common denominators
change and/or adapt in consequent fashion as circumstances change.
This would involve a series in which each constituent book is both
sufficiently repetitively closed and yet progressively open, sufficiently
repetitively predictable and yet progressively unpredictable. Tricky as
this may appear, this is precisely what is attempted in the Harry Potter
books. To be able to accommodate both repetition and progression,
constraints common to both tendencies operate in all of them. Not only
does each volume have similar structures which operate with regard to
certain common denominators (roughly similar events are encountered
by Harry in the Hogwarts environment in each volume, and culminate
in similar results), but they also use the common denominators to
demonstrate progressive development (the central characters – Harry, Ron,
Hermione – are shown to grow; Harry’s history – which is entwined
with Voldemort’s and Hogwarts’ history – is gradually revealed). There
is a sense of the independence of each subsequent volume after Stone,
mainly maintained by repeating the background at the beginning and
drawing each to a predictable conclusion. And yet each also leaves space
for progressive development in the next volume beyond the variation-
on-a-theme interest, primarily by leaving questions unanswered, by
deferring information, by suggesting that time passes with each subse-
quent volume and the actions in one may have consequences in the

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next. But the charting out of these techniques still does’t wholly explain
how the contrary pull of repetition and progression is managed. It is
clearly somehow pulled off in the Harry Potter books, and evidently with
some success: the contrary expectations of readers do not seem to get
cancelled out but appear to fuel each other toward, arguably, an ideal
pitch of interest. Is there a technical key of some sort that allows this to

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be done across a series of more than a couple of volumes, something
that applies equally to both repetition and progression which is singularly
well exploited?
The technical key, so to say, seems to me to be a method of elaboration:
both repeating and progressively delineating a finite number of situations
and themes by adding ever greater degrees of complexity in their rela-
tionships. Elaboration in this sense necessarily involves both repetition
and progressive delineation that are mutually dependent. To elaborate
it is necessary to repeat that which is elaborated, and each elaboration
leads to a series of consequences that mark progress. This occurs in
matters of detail as well as in the unfolding of the overarching repetitive/
developing plots of the Harry Potter novels. The manner in which the
Muggle world is treated in referential terms to focus on the Magic world
(that I have dwelt on in Chapter 11) is entirely a matter of repetitive and
progressive elaboration. Each successive novel fills in details that clarify
in a progressive fashion how the Magic world manages to exist within
the interstices of the Muggle world without becoming visible therein.
In Stone this is simply a matter of being hidden within or in-between
obvious material objects, through the overlooked entrance to the Leaky
Cauldron, through the wall that leads into Diagon Alley, through the
midst of platforms 9 and 10 at King’s Cross Station, through transform-
ations into cats and other beasts. The Ministry of Magic is mentioned
by Hagrid briefly in Stone (‘their main job is to keep it from the Muggles
that there’s still witches an’ wizard up an’ down the country’ 51), but
it’s mainly in Chamber that readers are introduced to the workings of the
Ministry of Magic: mind-controlling spells come up, and manipulation
of space (the insides of the Weasley’s car and house are larger than they
appear to be from outside) plays a role. In Prisoner the matter of trans-
formations, which had only occurred in an off-hand magical fashion in
the earlier books, is given flesh. In Goblet elaboration takes on grander
proportions: the Magic world not only exists, the reader finds out, in
the interstices of England but of the world at large. The manner in which
large establishments like Hogwarts School, the Quidditch Stadium, or
Hogsmeade Village (and others like these elsewhere in the world) are
hidden from Muggle attention – something that readers may have been

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wondering about – is explained. Elaboration of the relationship between

Muggle and Magic worlds occurs gradually. Past explanations are repeated
and expanded as the reader progresses through subsequent volumes. The
picture comes together as a painting comes together under the painter’s
brush (slowly acquiring definition and shades), becoming progressively
more vivid and always retaining all the layers of past efforts. Over

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repeated observations new observations continuously accrue, and naturally
as that happens what was initially simple becomes more complex, the
previously naïve gradually grows sophisticated. The relation between
Muggle and Magic worlds is obviously only one level of elaboration,
a matter of detail. Similar details accrue within the Magic world: wizard
relations with house-elves become more complex and elaborate as we
move from Chamber to Goblet; the dragon that fleetingly appeared in
Stone becomes a more concrete zoological phenomenon by the time we
get to Goblet; the Quidditch matches develop from school games to an
international event; and so on. But elaboration in this repetitive
progressive fashion is not simply a matter of accruing detail, gradually
adding layers to lie on top of previous layers, and making endlessly
reiterated features (from whatever perspective) progressively sharper
and more complex; it is also the deliberate technique which glues the
repetitive plot structure of each volume to the progressive movement of
successive volumes. Each successive encounter between Harry and Vol-
demort (or his agents) reveals something more of the past of both; and
though every new revelation imparts to subsequent encounters an air of
greater complexity and depth the outcome remains the same (the arch-
enemy is vanquished, the status quo restored, and the hero’s prowess
recognized). It is elaboration in this fashion that allows for both repetition
to occur and progression to take place. Elaboration and consequent
increase in complexity gives the impression of Harry (and others) growing:
the effect is of the central protagonist’s and his friends’ and the reader’s
acquiring greater degrees of awareness of essentially the same concerns,
of moving from simple to complex apprehension (hence progression) of
the same Magic-Muggle worlds (hence repetition), and therefore becoming
capable of doing the same things (repetition) with more resounding
effects (progression). Elaboration is, it seems to me, the key technique – no
wonder each subsequent book threatens to grow more voluminous than
the last.

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13
Evasive Allusions

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The Harry Potter novels constantly echo the faintly familiar. The names
of magical characters, the motifs and rituals of magic, the stories and
histories that give body to the Magic world appear often to refer back to
a shimmering vista of folklore, fairy tale and myth drawn indiscriminately
from a range of sources and contexts. The books do not perform self-
conscious recreations and adjustments of self-evident fairy tales as Angela
Carter did in some of her stories or as Anne Sexton did in some her
poems,1 and nor do they allude to the mythic or folkloric vista in any
systematic fashion. Several studies have tried to chart out the various
mythic and folkloric sources that are alluded to in the Harry Potter
novels,2 and the list of references are impressively wide and diverse. But
these allusions do not coalesce into a considered transmission of any
particular mythological or folkloric system, and the novels do not even
discriminate sufficiently between the allusive moment (the particular
name, the specific event that recalls a fairy tale or folklore or myth) and
the cultural context that the allusion originates within. These are allusions
of a different sort. They have some of the effects of fairy tales: some of
the escape-effects and comfort-effects that Tolkien, amongst many others,
squarely attributes to fairy tales.3 But the Harry Potter allusions resist being
fitted into patterns of transmission and negotiation (of social and political
values, through the repetition and adjustment of cultural codes) that
can be more or less unambiguously traced from a hazy source through
myriad retellings and transmissions of myths, folklore and fairy tales.
This observation may tickle the curiosity of mythologists, folklorists and
fairy tale historians who have conscientiously and meticulously charted
out such transmissions and negotiations,4 but I doubt whether anything
more significant can be done in this direction with the Harry Potter novels
than the compiling of compendiums of allusions. Such compendiums

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only reveal the inconsistency and indiscriminateness of the allusive

strategy of the Harry Potter novels. There is an implosion of discrete mythic,
folkloric and fairy tale sources in these, which disperse into molecules
that conglomerate with each other in reminiscent but new ways –
something that is allusive but transformed. The closest anticipation of
something like this by a folklorist that comes to mind is Vladimir Propp’s,

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when he observed (not unnaturally given his location in the Soviet)
that folklore is bound to be transformed in a socialist society and
become remote from its origins:

The question naturally arises: what is folklore in a classless society,

under socialism? It would seem that folklore, which is a class
phenomenon, should disappear. However, literature is also a class
phenomenon, but it does not disappear. Under socialism, folklore
loses its specific features as a product of the lower strata, since in
a socialist society there are neither upper nor lower strata, just the
people. Folklore indeed becomes national property. What is not in
harmony with the people dies out; what remains is subjected to
profound qualitative changes and comes closer to literature. 5

Ironically, a similar transformation has been wrought on folklore, fairy

tales and myths by the Harry Potter books, but from the midst of a
capitalist society and through capitalist channels. The implosion that
transforms these traditional forms and themes is that which brings them
closer to – perhaps absorbs them within – popular literature or mass
literature. But this is something to take up later, in considering consumer-
ism in the context of the Harry Potter novels and the Harry Potter
phenomenon. For the moment the following observation would do: the
Harry Potter novels remind readers of almost familiar fairy tales, folklores,
myths, but do not crystallize the relationship further. I am reasonably
sure that after the compendiums of allusions are collated, critics would
fail to find definite insights from them into these books. Certain general
observations may become available: for example, that fairy tales, myths,
folklore are alluded to in this way to encode modern values while
retaining the traditional effect; or that this is a way of assuming and/or
subverting the conventional authority of the story teller. But such
observations, general as they are, are not really the province of research
into original sources. They do not allude backwards to the past, but
sideways from Magic world to our world.

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14
Blood

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The first time Harry actually sees Voldemort it is as a hooded figure in
the forest feeding on a wounded Unicorn’s blood (Stone 187). At that
time Voldemort had usurped Quirrell’s (the stammering teacher of
Defence Against the Dark Arts) body, his face manifest on the other
side of Quirrell’s head. Chamber is about the opening of subterranean
vaults and releasing the long dead (undead?) dark forces within. Harry
hears the unleashed dark force (a Basilisk, it turns out eventually)
slithering through the walls of Hogwarts and muttering: ‘. . . I smell
blood . . . I SMELL BLOOD!’ (Chamber 105). In Prisoner there are the
Dementors, who, as Lupin (the new teacher of Defence Against Dark
Arts) explains, suck – literally, it turns out, with their mouths – out
human happiness and hope: ‘If it can, the Dementor will feed on you
long enough to reduce you to something like itself – soulless and evil.
You’ll be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life’
(Prisoner 140). The Dementors, who are spiritually akin to Voldemort,
significantly make their victims like themselves. Near the culminating
confrontation in Goblet, Voldemort brings himself to full strength
from something like ‘a crouched human child’, almost helpless. To do
this he gets his slave Wormtail to drop him in a cauldron, and add the
‘Bone of thy father’ (cemetery dust), the ‘Flesh of the servant’ (Worm-
wood’s hand, chopped off), and ‘Blood of the enemy’ (a phial of
Harry’s blood) for a miraculous transformation into wholeness (Goblet
556–7).
These images of sucking, drawing life and soul out of persons, feeding
on people, transforming physical form, gaining strength by imbibing
blood, withdrawing into underground chambers (coffins) – the conven-
tional associations of vampirism hardly need to be mentioned. Even in
their crude and sensationalistic physicality these images may convey

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something of the social and political anxieties of our time, just as, for
example, Nina Auerbach had discerned anxiety about ‘demonic’ New
Women and social Darwinistic fears in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and other
late nineteenth-century vampires. 1 But I am not sure what sort of con-
temporary our-worldly significance can be attributed to these images
yet; perhaps more time is needed to put our own social and political

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anxieties squarely into perspective. Or perhaps cannibalistic acts and
monstrous transformations reach back somewhere deeper into ‘our’
unconscious.2 However, that deeper delving into our minds is more
likely than not to take me away from the matter at hand: text-to-world
analysis with a view to discerning social and political effects. Let me,
instead, take the crudely physical at its face value, so that there is at
least this to infer: in dark magic blood is an effective magical substance, not
merely an organic component of wizard physiology but a powerful agent of
magical transformations and the exercise of magical power.
This crudely physical significance of blood to the wizard who delves
in dark magic slips fluidly into another kind of relevance of blood, one
that is also of particular interest to these wizards and one that unambigu-
ously means something in our social and political world. This is how
the matter develops. In Stone Draco Malfoy and his mates and family
connections are presented as the unpleasant counter to Harry and his
friends. In their first encounter in Diagon Alley and in the second
encounter on the Hogwarts Express it is established that what makes
Malfoy a potential villain is the sense of exclusiveness he draws from
his family connections (‘You’ll soon find out some wizarding families
are much better than others, Potter. You don’t want to go making
friends with the wrong sort.’ [Stone 81]) and some sort of connection
between Voldemort and allies and the Malfoys (Ron’s father, reportedly,
feels ‘Malfoy’s father didn’t need an excuse to go over to the Dark Side’
[Stone 82]). In Stone the connection between Malfoy and his family and
Voldemort and the Dark Side is left unclear. Malfoy suffers from some
sort of distasteful wizard snobbishness, it is suggested, rather than (here
it is) prejudice about blood lineage (as it turns out later), and it is left at
that. It is one of several kinds of evil – like the brutality of the Dursleys
and the fear that Voldemort inspires. What Malfoy here mainly objects
to, it seems, are Hagrid, a clumsy gamekeeper, and the Weasleys, who,
despite being of sound wizard origins, are simply poor. In Chamber
there is a sudden convergence between the presentation of Malfoy (and
his family connections) and Voldemort (the Dark Side), and it has to
do with prejudice against Muggle blood. What unites the Malfoys
and Voldemort with the Dark Side is a certain ideological perspective,

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 Blood 101

an explicitly fascist ideology that wishes to preserve the purity of Magic

blood from any taint of Muggle blood. In fact, it gradually emerges that
it is this fascist ideology that primarily characterizes the evil of the Dark
Side. First Mr. Malfoy accuses Mr. Weasley of keeping the wrong kind of
company because he was accompanied by Hermione’s Muggle parents
at the wizard bookshop, leading to a rather spectacular scuffle (Chamber

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51). Then Hermione herself is spitefully called a ‘filthy little Mudblood’
by Draco Malfoy (Chamber 86), leading to even more spectacular con-
frontations. As Ron explains to Harry soon afterwards: ‘’Mudblood’s
a really foul name for someone who was muggle-born – you know,
non-magic parents. There are some wizards – like Malfoy’s family – who
think they’re better than everyone else because they’re what people call
pure-blood’ (Chamber 89). Soon after the Malfoys’ fascism is thus
revealed, notice is given by a written message on a wall in Hogwarts
that ‘THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE
HEIR BEWARE’, which is interpreted by Draco Malfoy immediately:
‘Enemies of the heir, beware! You’ll be next, Mudbloods!’ (Chamber
106). The story behind the Chamber of Secrets is told in the following
chapter by the ghostly History of Magic teacher, Binns, and it does seem
to signify a long history of wizard fascism, going back to one of the
founders of Hogwarts, Salazar Slytherin (Chamber 114). From here
onwards the evil that Voldemort and the Dark Side personify, and with
which the Malfoys remain consistently associated, has to do with this
prejudice – hatred of Muggles and the desire to exterminate them and
all who are contaminated by them, preservation of pure-blood wizards,
presumably the desire to take over all worlds and rid them of Muggle
blood altogether and populate them with wizard blood only. Against
that alignment clearly stands the established order which is friendly to
Muggles to the extent of taking the trouble of existing in the interstices
of their world, and not interfering with them, and accepting those of
the Muggle-born who have magical qualities (like Hermione, or Harry’s
mother) in their fold. Mr. Weasley represents this benign established
order: a pure-blood wizard himself with very little direct contact with
Muggles, but tirelessly working to maintain the invisibility of the Magic
world, fascinated by all things of Muggle origin (a collector of all kinds
of Muggle-made odds and ends, especially electric plugs), and most
eager to know all about Muggles.
The theme of blood as lineage, analogous to race in our world, simmers
away without being emphasized in Prisoner (where it becomes clear how
effortlessly wizards can kill Muggles), but comes back squarely to the
centre in Goblet. It starts with Voldemort killing a Muggle (18–19). This

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is followed by a remarkable scene of a kind of wizard lynch mob playing

with a family of Muggles:

A crowd of wizards, tightly packed and moving together with wands

pointing straight upwards, was marching slowly across the field.
Harry squinted at them . . . they didn’t seem to have faces . . . then he

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realised that their heads were hooded and their faces masked. High
above them, floating along in mid-air, four struggling figures were
being contorted into grotesque shapes. It was as though the masked
wizards on the ground were puppeteers, and the people above them
were marionettes operated by invisible strings that rose from the
wands into the air. Two of the figures were very small.
More wizards were joining the marching group, laughing and
pointing up at the floating bodies. Tents crumpled and fell as the
marching crowd swelled. Once or twice Harry saw one of the march-
ers blast a tent out of his way with his wand. Several caught fire. The
screaming grew louder.
The floating people were suddenly illuminated as they passed over
a burning tent, and Harry recognised one of them – Mr. Roberts, the
campsite manager. The other three looked as though they might be
his wife and children. One of the marchers below flipped Mrs. Roberts
upside-down with his wand; her nightdress fell down to reveal volu-
minous drawers; she struggled to cover herself up as the crowd below
her screeched and hooted with glee.
‘That’s sick,’ Ron muttered, watching the smallest Muggle child, who
had begun to spin like a top, sixty feet above the ground, his head
flopping limply from side to side. (Goblet 108)

The manner in which the crowd grows and cheers marks this demon-
stration as a popular one, which the established order (the ministry) is
hard-pressed to overcome. The image itself of Muggles as puppets being
controlled by wizard puppeteers in reverse (not puppets hanging down
from the puppeteer’s hands, but being levitated above) is analogous to
the situation that obtains in the existing Muggle–Magic worlds: wizards
do control the Muggle world by, as I have argued above, not revealing
themselves – by creating a sense of its independence (Muggles seem to
be and feel on top of things but are controlled secretly from below,
from the invisible interstices). But in this image the existing situation,
which is generally designed to be benign to Muggles, has suddenly
taken on a nasty turn: Muggles become the cogs in wizard spectator
sports; the demonstration is imbued with the perversion of a molester’s
or rapist’s desire (flipping Mrs. Roberts upside-down); it teeters on the
annihilation of the most vulnerable (the smallest Muggle child), conjur-
ing up all the horror of children being abused and shaken to death

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(‘his head flopping limply from side to side’). The impact of this scene
on Harry and his friends (even Ron, who expresses disgust at the
moment) is, however, fleeting, and the whole thing is quickly forgotten
after a few memory-modifying spells return the Roberts to their world.
Hermione, who has affectionate and supportive Muggle parents, gives
it little time. Harry doesn’t much dwell on it – after all, his Muggle

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guardians, the Dursleys, are not especially splendid representatives of
Muggledom. But perhaps some readers may begin to sympathize with
something of the Dursleys’ medieval attitude to magic in a medieval
world?
The theme of the fascist obsession with blood grows more complex in
Goblet thereafter. More dimensions of prejudice are added in. Another
strain of blood, another magical race, is inserted in the picture – the giants,
from whom it appears both Hagrid and the Beauxbatonians’ Head-
mistress Madame Maxime have partly descended. Ron, generally well
informed of blood-lines, explains the problem with giants to Harry:
‘Harry, they’re just vicious, giants. It’s like Hagrid said, it’s in their natures,
they’re like trolls . . . they just like killing, everyone knows that’ (Chamber
374). Greater degrees of complexity come in. Ron’s assertion that the
giants are vicious is, of course, undercut by the fact that Hagrid’s wizard
father and a giantess had had an affectionate relationship. The Aurors,
who protect the established and apparently benign (at least to Muggles)
order from the fascist Dark Side, have apparently done some extermin-
ating of their own. The unscrupulous journalist Rita Skeeter’s story gives
an interpretation of the background of the giants (Chamber 381–2),
mainly claiming that the giants were killers by nature and had joined
the Dark Side. It is however indicated that Hagrid’s father and Dumble-
dore had a different view of giants (Chamber 395–6). Yet other magical
races seem to lurk in the background. There are the enticing Bulgarian
Veelas, for instance, and it turns out that the Beauxbatonian Fleur
Delacour was part Veela.
The preoccupation with blood as a signification of magical races, and
the identifiably fascist politics of the Magic world associated with that,
cannot but resonate with the politics of race in our world. I do not need
to give a survey of what the politics of race in our world consists in: in
many different contexts and with various connotations the politics of race
(from far right fascist politics, to left-leaning anti-racist movements and
liberal multiethnic policy-making, to racial supremacism that opposes
certain racist alignments in mirror images) in various forms (in terms of
immigration policies, with regard to nationalism and religious fundamen-
talism, through imperialist and anti-imperialist processes, in the context
of positive discrimination legislation, etc.) has subsumed and continues
to subsume our world. Even as I write this (summer 2002) in London, the
newspapers I read are occupied with the so-called immigration ‘problem’

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in Europe, the rise of the far right in a range of Western European

countries in local and national elections (Austria, Denmark, France,
Holland, Italy, Germany, Britain), the fall-out of the terrorist attacks of
11 September in the US, the terrible bloodshed between Israelis and
Palestinians – and all of these are at the root to do with the politics of
race. In Britain the heightened awareness of institutional racism following

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the Stephen Lawrence murder (April 1993) case; a continuous bubbling
of hysteria directed against allegedly vast numbers of asylum seekers
who are targeting Britain; a series of racial riots in Oldham, Burnley and
Bradford in summer 2001; Britain’s delicate role of chief instigator of
the ‘war against international terrorism’ after the US following the terrorist
attacks of 11 September; the gains made by the far right British
Nationalist Party in local elections in May 2002 – all these have kept the
politics of race on the forefront. Lurking behind these immediate mani-
festations, a long history of imperialism and discriminatory politics, as
well as hard-fought emancipatory battles, stretches backward. In our world
the pervasiveness of the politics of race is difficult to evade; unthink-
ingly or otherwise the presentation of magical races and the wizard
politics that devolves from the conflict between them is bound to become
a gesture made in the politics of race in our world.
Insofar as the Harry Potter novels are a gesture made in the politics of
race in our world, they appear to be fairly unambiguously against
intolerant and extremist ideologies; against violent demands for racial
purity, and in favour of tolerance and the widest ambit of personal
relationships between people. 3 At the very least these make a liberal
gesture, in keeping with the quest for a ‘multicultural society’ that New
Labour policy-makers have made their ostensible task in the United
Kingdom in the midst of devolution and the immigration ‘problem’
(wherein these books were produced and first received). Fascism, with
its demands for racial purity and conviction in the insurmountable
difference between racial groups, and with its violent exterminative
mentality, becomes the embodiment of absolute evil, Voldemort and
the Dark Side, when translated to the Magic world. Just as people of
different races are ultimately drawn together by the possibility of love,
desire and procreation that transcend racial boundaries, those of different
magical races are shown to be similarly drawn together: Muggles and
wizards, wizards and giants, wizards and Veela are attracted to each
other, love and procreate. Just as racial boundaries sometimes are
almost invisible in any culturally effective sense (the Jews in Europe,
second- and third-generation ethnic minorities in a range of contexts),
so too the magical races can become effectively invisible (which allows

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the Muggle-born to merge seamlessly into the Magic world, and the
part-giants to become – despite their obvious size – invisible as such).
Just as racism in our world is associated with arbitrary and irrational
violence and brutality, so too in the Magic world the cruelty and violence
of the Dark Side is indelibly associated with blood-prejudice.
And yet in the midst of that on the whole liberal gesture there are little

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fissures that have worried some critics, so much so that Jack Zipes, for
instance, felt (unpopularly at the time) that:

The scheme of things [in the Harry Potter novels] is very similar to the
Disney corporation’s The Lion King, which celebrates male dominance
and blood rule. In fact, here people are ‘chosen’ for the task of leader-
ship because they have the right magical skills and good genes. It
doesn’t matter that they happen to be all white, all British, all from
good homes, and that the men and boys call the shots. What matters
is the feeling of security that we gain after reading one or more of
Rowling’s novels.4

A more considered view of the matter is in Andrew Blake’s observations

on the place of Muggles in the Magic world-view, which clearly impinge
on the liberal gesture regarding racial politics that is made:

Consider the pervasive peripheral presence of an inferior species, the

Muggles. They can give birth to wizards . ..; doubtless this works through
some set of recessive genes. Harry’s own Muggle ancestry should not
blind us to the ways in which Muggles are represented as different
from wizards – and that difference, let’s be clear, is constituted by
lack of ability. . . . In these Roald Dahlesque portrayals Muggles are
disabled; constrained by their lack to rely on technology, while hope-
lessly unaware of the parallel world around them. Popular etymology
has already adopted ‘Muggle’ as a term of abuse. . . . The books do
their best to raise awareness of racism, and they consistently attack
ideas about purity, blood and race, but at the heart of all the stories
is a semi-parallel magical world whose inhabitants are superior to
ordinary humans, and that’s that.5

The criticism about the attitude to race (blood) in what is apparently

a liberal gesture is worth teasing out further. It may be worrying that
the established order that opposes the absolute evil of Voldemort’s
fascism is not entirely free of its own kind of fascist proclivities. There
is, after all, no Muggle representative in Magic political institutions that

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have so much to do with Muggles (there is though a course on Muggles

offered at Hogwarts); the most well disposed towards Muggles of wizard
officials (Mr. Weasley) has little or no contact with Muggles, has some-
thing of an air of an entomologist studying insects as far as Muggles go,
and could be thought of as rather patronizing towards Muggles like
Hermione’s parents and the Dursleys; the established order has a dubi-

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ous role in tolerating the Malfoys and other obviously fascist elements
within itself; the established order has also carried out its own dodgy
extermination-of-giants agenda sometime in the past; such Muggles as
are presented (the Dursleys) are not good specimens of the race; wizard
children, even those with Muggle parents, seem to worry little about
the dangers that Muggles face. These or such observations are, naturally,
not a little worrying; but against that it could be argued that these do
describe something like the truth of our world. It is arguably not the job
of the fictional world to correct the unpalatable facts of our world but to
reflect them and raise them to awareness, and certainly such ambiguities
are amply manifested even amongst the well-meaning and more tolerant
institutions and people of our world. On the other hand, it is not so
much that Zipes and Blake above question that such ambiguities exist
in our world and could therefore exist in the fictional Magic world, but
that these are presented in a fashion that doesn’t bring them to awareness:
these are presented as being natural and comfortable. If that is the case
these worries are not entirely off the point.
Zipes’s comment about the manner in which the races of our world
(white, black, brown) are positioned in the wizard world is an interest-
ing crossover observation. A similar comment is made by Blake, though
with a contrary emphasis. For Blake the races of our world are presented
in the Harry Potter books as being a matter of complete indifference to
Magic world fascism, and yet as significantly being there. Blake observes
that the fact that what in our world would be considered ‘mixed-race
relationships’ are so happily accepted in Magic world is bound to make
an impression on our world readers: in brief, ‘The idea of pure-blood
is . . . undermined by the ways in which different ethnic groups inter-
act’. 6 In these observations about the relationship between the races of
our world and Magic races both Zipes and Blake make equally valid
though contrary observations. In the Magic world the races of our world
are obviously not deliberately discriminated against (indeed, the contrary),
and yet it is the white characters who are centre-stage while the others
are tokenistic marginal characters. But so what? That contrary positions
in such crossover (between Magic and our worlds) can both seem equally
persuasive is due to the complexities of race politics in our world.

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 Blood 107

In practice, it has often been found that legislation on the basis of a lib-
eral multiculturalist or ethnically pluralist idea has been received with
trepidation not only by those with nationalist or far right sympathies
but also by the minorities it was meant to protect. It is hardly surprising
that the ambiguities of our world could be transferred to our reading of
any treatment of such issues.

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The more obvious and far more worrying matter at the bottom of the
apparently liberal and no doubt well-meant gesture that the Harry Potter
books make is that which Blake touches upon without fully elucidating
the consequences, in remarking the insurmountable ‘disability’ of Muggles
compared to Magic people. This is not simply a ‘caveat’ in a liberal gesture
(as Blake says), it is ideologically central with ripples of overt and covert
effects that spread out in concentric circles across the entire treatment
of race politics in the Harry Potter books. Those who have opposed racism
and explicitly or implicitly racist ideologies have generally done so on
the understanding that despite some physiognomic and physiological
differences the people of different races are essentially equal in intellec-
tual and physical terms, and therefore should be offered equal recogni-
tion and opportunities in social and political spheres. There are obviously
a few exceptions to this: for example, a fight against racism can take the
form of political representatives of an oppressed and dominated race
asserting the supremacy of that race over that of the oppressor’s. Certain
strands of the black civil liberties movement in the US had, for instance,
asserted the (at least) moral superiority of oppressed black people over
oppressive and racist white people in racial terms.7 This could be
thought of as a pragmatic oppositional stance, or as reverse racism. But
by and large anti-racist positions have almost always been assumed and
argued for on the understanding of an essential equality of people irre-
spective of racial categories, whether this equality is argued for on religious
grounds (‘equality in the eyes of God’), or in common-sense symbolic
terms (‘beneath the skin everyone’s blood is the same colour’), or in
terms of contribution to society, or in terms of intellectual and physical
capacity. The social and political connotations of equality and their
practical consequences are fraught with several complicated consider-
ations (such as the need to make distinctions between absolute equality,
complex equality and basic equality) that I have examined elsewhere 8
and do not go into here. But, this is worth emphasizing again, irrespect-
ive of the exceptions and the theoretical complexities that intervene,
there can be little doubt that the spirit of resistance to fascist ideologies
and proclivities have derived overwhelmingly from some understanding
of the essential equality of people irrespective of race; or, in other words,

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on the understanding that racial distinctions do not provide rational

grounds for explaining such differences as are apparent between different
groups of people, not to speak of individuals.
With this in mind it becomes apparent that as a liberal gesture within
the politics of race in our world the Harry Potter books inevitably fail.
They don’t fail because they (probably unthinkingly) countenance preju-

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dice themselves (as Zipes suggests); they fail because the apparent
analogue of Magic racism with racism in our world is misleading; there
is, despite appearances, nothing analogous. The thing is that the wizards
as a magical race are in some significant and unquestionable ways superior
to the Muggles (as Blake notes). The wizards simply have magic, and
Muggles don’t. This makes Muggles slow (in covering distances, making
things, etc.) and wizards fast. This makes Muggles weak and wizards
strong. Muggles are limited to their given physical forms, wizards can
transform themselves in various ways. Most importantly, in relation to
wizards Muggles are inevitably and uncontrollably passive – as puppets
to puppeteers. If Muggles are left free and in control of their world it
is because wizards have kind-heartedly and charitably chosen that it
should be so; it is always possible that if wizards who are otherwise
disposed come to power all that would change and Muggles would have
little choice in the matter. The Muggle–Magic worlds of the Harry Potter
books are after all part of a medieval world, and here medieval concep-
tions – even of difference – apply. Not insignificantly, as I observed at
the beginning of this chapter, in the Muggle–Magic worlds blood is not
simply a passive organic substance, it does have magical properties. To
the wizard fascist blood is not simply a symbolic signifier of race that
acquires irrational and arbitrary significance (as it does to fascists in our
world); in the Dark Arts blood all too materially matters. A preoccupation
with blood is not a kind of obsessive disorder in the wizard fascist’s
mind; it is a potent and magically real agent. The presentation of magical
races and consequent ideologies might seem to make for a liberal gesture
that is relevant to our world, but actually there is no gesture (liberal or
otherwise) that can be understood in our world. A liberal gesture is
generally understood as implying that all races are essentially equal; but
where such a gesture seems to be located in the Harry Potter books, only
magical races that are unequal are presented. This can’t apply to our world
as a liberal gesture. And yet it would be incorrect to think of the Harry
Potter books as therefore countenancing and perhaps even supporting
racial prejudice: that sort of prejudice is unambiguously placed within
the magical world (and therefore insofar as it can apply to our world
therein too) as the absolute evil. There is no doubt that the possibility of

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 Blood 109

transcending magical racial boundaries through interpersonal relation-

ships and desire is presented in a favourable light. It is probably best to
consider the misplaced analogue as one that is unthinkingly made.
However, if this misguided analogue is not taken as a manifestation of
unthinkingness, then the only coherent inference of social and political
effect (in this regard) in our world from the Harry Potter books that

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remains is a disturbing and paradoxical one. This would be more or less
as follows: the anti-racism and tolerance that exists in our world is
essentially due to the charity and altruism of those belonging to super-
ior races. There are superior and inferior races, and the latter are neces-
sarily at the mercy of the former. It behoves the superior races to choose
to be benign to the inferior races, to leave the inferior races free and in
control of their spaces (however defined), as a moral obligation. That
superior races are able to do so may be enlisted as another attribute of
their racial superiority. It is out of the goodness of his heart, after all,
that Mr. Weasley is so friendly to Muggles and that Dumbledore is
inclined to accept the Muggle-born in Hogwarts and that the Ministry
of Magic chooses to keep the Magic world in the interstices of Muggle
world – none of this occurs because any one in Magic world is convinced
that Muggles are equal to them. At best, Muggles are useful (as Ron says
in Chamber) because they can be non-interfering vessels for accommo-
dating and perpetuating wizard blood. All that this demonstrates is that
the established order is controlled by good wizards, not that wizards
and Muggles can be considered equal. Voldemort and the Dark Side are
not wrong in considering themselves superior to Muggles, or in their
assessment of the power of blood, but they are misguided in thinking
that wizards with Muggle blood are weaker and they are simply bad in
choosing to exterminate Muggles and Muggle-born wizards.
This position is, of course, racist too in the same way that Kiplingesque
ideas like ‘the white man’s burden’ or the ‘imperial mission’, used to
justify European colonialism in the nineteenth century, were racist. I doubt
whether it was intended thinkingly and deliberately in the Harry Potter
books. But equally I don’t (and I have explained already why I don’t)
think it matters whether it was intended. Most probably it crept in
unthinkingly despite well-meaning liberal intentions. But it can certainly
be inferred. Perhaps unthinkingly none of this would be inferred;
perhaps it requires careful analysis for such a position to emerge from
the Harry Potter books. But then again, perhaps precisely this position
can be unthinkingly inferred and absorbed without any interrogation,
perhaps without even being aware enough of its implications to know
that it has quietly been inferred and absorbed. It is possible that the fact

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that such a position can be unthinkingly inferred and absorbed from the
Harry Potter books has some role to play behind the Harry Potter phe-
nomenon – is part and parcel of the social and political effects of the
Harry Potter books. It is conceivable that even if a prodigious number of
readers have inferred and absorbed such a position through reading Harry
Potter books they may not be fully aware of it. It is perfectly possible

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that the Harry Potter books appeal to some readers because such a position
is available within it and it chimes in, unthinkingly, with their existing
unthinking ideological attitudes. Perhaps such a position is not really
inferred but constructed under the guise of being inferred by those who
have it in mind already. But then is my analysis above no more than
a product of my own ideological tendencies and preoccupations?
And yet the nineteenth-century ‘colonial mission’ kind of thinking is
not inconsequential to our social and political world. It has reappeared,
has it not, after the terrorist attacks in the US? Robert Cooper’s (one of
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s advisers) call for a ‘new kind of
imperialism’ (from the West) that would render ‘rogue states’ and
fundamentalist political alignments more pliant to the current world
order received considerable media attention. 9
Plenty of perhapses and plenty of open questions there. I do not
undertake to resolve these; I do not think they can all be conclusively
answered anyway. But my text-to-world analysis, even in this regard, is
not done. This leads on to further considerations. I come to that gradually.
There are other analytical directions to follow up which can be tied to
this later.

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15
Servants and Slaves

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At the beginning of Stone Harry appears to be a sort of boy Cinderella in
the Dursleys’ home, being maltreated and made to do all the housework
(he is set to fry bacon and eggs pretty much as soon as he is properly
introduced to the reader), while his cousin Dudley is showered with
presents and spoiled. He lives in a cupboard under the stairs, a space
that serves as both bedroom and punishment chamber. Cousin Dudley
and his friends bully Harry constantly, his Aunt and Uncle shout abuse
at him as often as they set eyes on him and otherwise neglect him.
When the move to secondary school is imminent, the reader is informed
that Dudley will go to Vernon’s old school while Harry will go to Stone-
wall High, the local comprehensive (Stone 28). In being transported to
Magic world Harry’s lot in life changes substantially. Instead of being
abused and put to work he finds himself in an environment where he is
particularly favoured (he is famous already), and where work is appar-
ently not an issue. At Hogwarts the food seems to appear spontaneously
on the plate, and no one mentions the need to dust or clean the sump-
tuous apartments that the students occupy – at least in Stone. Domestic
chores in Magic households, judging from the Weasleys’ Burrow, also
seem to be relatively painless: while Mrs. Weasley does take the trouble
to fry sausages and sends her sons off to ‘de-gnome’ the garden, cleaning
is automatic with the use of a wand (Chamber 31), and there is even
magical help with cooking (books in the kitchen have titles like Charm
Your Own Cheese, Enchantment in Baking and One Minute Feasts – It’s
Magic, all literally meant no doubt [Chamber 31]). Hogwarts itself has the
air of an elite English public school; the prevailing codes of conduct, the
hierarchies among students, the sumptuousness of the surroundings
and sense of tradition are all reminiscent of an establishment from the
past when mainly the elite were entitled to an education, rather than

111

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112 Re-Reading Harry Potter

an establishment of the welfare state where all are entitled to an educa-

tion. The redeeming feature is that in fact Hogwarts appears to be the
only school in British Magic world, accommodating all wizards of what-
ever class (whether rich Malfoys or poor Weasleys or Muggle-blood
Potters and Grangers). The only condition for admission into Hogwarts
seems to be magical ability (however little, even Neville gets admission),

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and an ability to at least provide school texts and equipment.
In other words, in being transported from Muggle world to Magic
world Harry escapes servitude in at least two senses. He escapes the kind
of servitude that Muggles impose on each other (as the Dursleys impose
their demands for help in the house on Harry), which in the broader
picture results in class distinctions and hierarchies (marked by the
distinction between those who have access to, say, elite public schools and
democratic comprehensive schools). He also escapes the kind of servitude
that is, so to say, the Muggle-condition compared to the Magic-condition:
Muggles just have to labour more for survival and further attainment
(in serving themselves) than wizards, who can achieve much by magic.
The distinction in terms of labour between Muggle and Magic worlds
that is suggested by Stone is, however, not maintained much further. With
the introduction of Dobby, and therefore house-elves in general, from
Chamber onwards the concept and practicalities of servitude are introduced
into Magic world in a manner that is clearly resonant with our world,
if not Muggle world.
A preliminary observation about house-elves like Dobby: there is no
evidence that house-elves constitute another magical race like giants or
Veelas. If the comparison with human races in our world is to be main-
tained, what marks humanity across races is the ability to procreate
with each other.1 Despite apparent physical differences the fact that
wizards and Muggles, wizards and giants, wizards and Veelas can have
intercourse with each other and have progeny marks them as all members
of one species. House-elves are magical, but there is no evidence that
they can procreate with wizards; it is likely that house-elves simply belong
to a different magical species. The only thing that delineates house-elves
as a magical group apart from their distinctive appearance and verbal
ticks (that habit of speaking of themselves in the third person), is their
absolute servitude. Their situation is explained by Dobby when he
introduces himself to Harry: ‘Dobby is a house-elf – bound to serve one
house and one family for ever’, ‘A house-elf must be set free, sir’, they
can’t escape (Chamber 16); and admirably summed up by Fred Weasley,
Ron’s brother: ‘house-elves have got powerful magic of their own, but
they can’t usually use it without their master’s permission’ (Chamber 27).

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The conditions that attach to magical races therefore are not relevant to
Dobby; with Dobby the reader is introduced to the conditions of servitude
in Magic world that may be considered to be analogous to those that
pertain to our world, quite distinct from the matter of blood-prejudice.
It is immediately evident in Chamber that the conditions of servitude
that attach to Magic world apropos Dobby split into two considerations,

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both of which are suggestive given experience of our world (or to ser-
vitude in Muggle world that Harry escapes). Dobby is the representative
of a condition of wizard servitude that is peculiar to his species, and
before long (primarily in Goblet) the entire condition of servitude as a
kind of species-specific characteristic is taken up. Dobby also gives insight
into particularly negative manifestations of Magic master–servant power
relations – he is the abused servant. The manner in which an individual
will is brutally used to command service from another individual even
against the latter’s will, or the dark side of master–servant relations, is
taken up as an aspect of the magical Dark Side in both Prisoner and
Goblet. In many ways Dobby in the Magic world is obviously not unlike
Harry in the Muggle world.
Dobby’s plight as a house-elf of the Malfoys is essentially the result of
poor treatment rather than being caused by his sense of injustice about
his species-condition. Dobby’s will is cruelly subjugated against his
judgement and desire despite his species-conditioned inclination to be
a faithful server. It is the cruelty of this situation, the constant and
painful suffering that Dobby has to endure, that makes the master–
servant relationship in this specific case an undesirable one, and aligns
it with the Dark Side (with which the Malfoys are clearly associated, and
to aid which the Malfoys use Dobby). The alignment with the Dark
Side, and the kind of master–servant relationship that it entails, is
Dobby’s complaint to Harry:

‘Dobby remembers how it was when He Who Must Not Be Named

was at the height of his powers, sir! We house-elves were treated like
vermin, sir! Of course, Dobby is still treated like that, sir,’ he admitted,
drying his face on the pillowcase. ‘But mostly, sir, life has improved for
my kind since you triumphed over He Who Must Not Be Named. . . . ’
(Chamber 133–4)

Any pity, then, that Dobby’s condition deserves is not because he is bound
to a species-condition of servitude (Dobby doesn’t complain about being
a house-elf), but because of the particular kind of master–servant
relationship he suffers from (he complains about the treatment he

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receives under specific conditions and from specific quarters). It is

essentially that that Harry ultimately releases Dobby from. In the process
he also releases Dobby from his species-condition of servitude, but the
consequences of that doesn’t become evident till Goblet.
The kind of oppressive master–servant relationships that are associ-
ated with the Dark Side is developed elsewhere in the depiction of that

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between Voldemort and his servant – known variously as Scabbers, Peter
Pettigrew or Wormtail. Chapter 19 of Chamber (‘The Servant of Lord
Voldemort’) gives a quite different sort of depiction of the servant, one
that is not bound by a species-condition but by a particular bent of
character. Sirius Black, Harry’s parents’ friend and his Godfather, sums
up the driving force of Wormtail’s character when he says: ‘. . . you never
did anything for anyone unless you could see what was in it for you’
(Prisoner 271). Combined with that is Wormtail’s lack of self-confidence,
his innate dependence on others to protect himself, apparent even at
that moment of crisis when he is faced with his crimes by his former
friends and now deadly enemies, Lupin and Black. The pathetic appeals
that Wormtail makes, first to Ron (‘“Kind boy . . . kind master . . .” Petti-
grew crawled towards Ron, “you won’t let them do it . . . I was your
rat . . . I was a good pet”’ [Prisoner 274]) and then to Harry (‘“Harry!”
gasped Pettigrew, and he flung his arms around Harry’s knees, “You –
thank you – it’s more than I deserve – thank you – ”’ [Prisoner 274]) – reveal
a character that is ready to serve his interests at any cost to his dignity
and independence, a weak and dependent personality. Self-seeking
combined with weakness and dependence makes Wormtail endlessly
manipulable, either by threats of violence or promises of reward; he
becomes naturally the ideal servant of Voldemort, who is ready to
exploit both. In Goblet the reader finds Wormtail serving Voldemort
with fear and reverence, the absolute pawn of the brutal master: he is
repulsed by Voldemort’s monstrous appearance but kept subservient by
his fear of Voldemort’s power; he sacrifices his hand finally in expectation
of a reward from Voldemort and gets it, a magical hand, in return. And
fear too is what all the other followers of Voldemort, the Death Eaters,
feel for him – and it is fear too that makes them all serve him: when
Voldemort comes back to full-blown life at the end of Goblet and faces
his loyal Death Eaters, they all address him as ‘master’ and all bow to
his power in fear. In some sense they all prove to be not unlike Wormtail.
It is the brutal master–servant relationship (of a dominating will that
overcomes others and exploits self-seeking and unconfident desires) that
cements followers of the Dark Side under their leader, their Führer.
The alignment of absolute evil that is Voldemort and the Dark Side has

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the fascist desire for pure-blood as its ideological characteristic, and

master–servant bonding as its organizational mode.
The master–servant relationship as brutal, punitive and consuming
manipulation is that aspect of wizard servitude that is clearly aligned
with the Dark Side – with evil – through the depiction of Dobby’s plight
as well as through the description of Voldemort’s servants (primarily

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Wormtail, but to some extent all Death Eaters). But that, I have observed
above, is a particular kind of master–servant relationship, and its
association with the Dark Side cannot therefore be read as a mode of
expressing reservations about master–servant relationships per se.
Though it is explicitly the oppressive and exploitative master–servant
relationship that Dobby abhors, there is in the quotation of Dobby’s
speech above just a whiff of a larger discontentment: discontentment with
his species-condition of servitude itself. While recalling with horror the
kind of treatment house-elves had received when Voldemort was in
power, and admitting the improvement in house-elf service conditions
under the present dispensation, Dobby speaks in the name of all house-
elves: ‘us, . . . the lowly, the enslaved, us dregs of the magical world’.
This designation of house-elves may be read as demonstrating, irrespective
of conditions of service, a clear and unhappy apprehension of the very
condition of inevitably being a subject-species, the ‘dregs of the magical
world’. There is, irrespective of how well or badly house-elves are
treated, some undeniable justice in this disgruntlement: after all, how
well or badly house-elves are treated is, in the final count, not under the
control of house-elves; it is always something that is decided from
above, so to say. And clearly there exists no mechanism in the Magic
world to rectify this situation. Even if we are assured that in general
wizards tend to be benign and considerate masters, it must be admitted
that being a house-elf (inevitably bound by a species-defined servitude)
is a pretty uncomfortable condition. This is so especially if house-elves prove
to be or prove capable of being aware of the condition as such, which Dobby
certainly is.
In Chamber this was a fleeting and insubstantial consideration, which
could be thoughtlessly neglected, but which could equally make some
sort of passing impression on some readers – accustomed as most readers
in our world are to sorting out what constitutes fair conditions in matters
of service (for, say, an employee), and what constitutes unfair conditions
of service. Being inevitably in a situation where one has no choice
about how one may be used and no mode of redress if one is used badly
would, I think, strike most in our world as being unjust. This might well
be a key criterion in the distinction between slavery and being in service

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(or being a servant in the broadest sense). The other obvious criterion in
distinguishing between slavery and service is, of course, the matter of
payment: the status of the slave as possession of the master is made
clear by not making service conditional to any necessary payment; the
independence of the servant (in the broadest sense) is acknowledged in
the payment that is contractually made for her services. Interestingly,

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in Goblet the reader is presented with a consideration of these issues
(both in terms of discomfort at the notion of a species-conditionality of
servitude, and in addressing the question of pay for services) beyond
the issue of masters mistreating their servants.
A series of interesting reversals from impressions conveyed in Chamber
are set in motion with the introduction of another house-elf in Goblet.
A female house-elf called Winky, who is in the service of Mr. Crouch of
the Ministry of Magic and turns out to be Dobby’s friend, is accidentally
befriended by Harry at the Quidditch World Cup stadium. On being
questioned about Dobby’s welfare she too (reminiscent of Dobby)
speaks with a sense of what is expected of house-elves as a species, but
in a quite different tenor from Dobby’s impassioned and agonized
pronouncements. She regrets that Harry had set Dobby free because he
is getting, ‘Ideas above his station, sir’; denounces him because ‘He is
wanting paying for his work, sir’; and states with conviction what is
apparently understood as a priori for house-elves, ‘House-elves is not
paid, sir!’ (Goblet 89). Now, here’s clear confirmation of something that
could have been suspected before but not confirmed: house-elves are, as
a species, slaves and not servants. They are not paid. As a species also,
house-elves (quite unlike the impression Dobby had made in Chamber)
are actually quite happy to be slaves, content with that lot in life and
expecting nothing else. And, house-elves are not merely kept by wizards
associated with the Dark Side, but also by wizards at the heart of the
establishment, like Mr. Crouch of the Ministry of Magic. When, a little
later, Winky is suspected by Mr. Crouch of conjuring up the Dark Mark
of Voldemort and dismissed her reaction is very different from Dobby’s
when he was released. She is clearly shattered and remains inconsolable
for the rest of the novel despite finding employment eventually at
Hogwarts along with Dobby. That house-elves occupy the nether terri-
tories of Hogwarts itself comes as a revelation: the cooking and cleaning
of Hogwarts isn’t done magically after all, and house-elves are not only
possessed by the occasional snobbish family, but are at the heart of
wizard institutions, including the most upright of them. As this realization
dawns on the reader, so gradually does the understanding that Dobby
was in fact the odd one out among house-elves, and Winky the normal

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 Servants and Slaves 117

one. When Harry, Hermione and Ron find their way to the domain of
house-elves in Hogwarts, the kitchens where Dobby and Winky are now
employed, they discover that Dobby is looked upon as an embarrass-
ment by Winky and all the other elves. The more proudly Dobby speaks
of his freedom and his desire for getting paid, the more the other
house-elves behave as though Dobby had behaved embarrassingly

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(Goblet 329–30). It is soon revealed that Dobby’s desire for payment is
itself more than modest, for though Dumbledore had apparently offered
him ten galleons he had accepted only one as adequate payment. But that
itself is considered stooping too low for a house-elf by Winky, who
scornfully announces that getting paid is beneath her, that she is ashamed
of having been set free, and expresses her deepest loyalty to Mr. Crouch
(Goblet 331). Dobby’s sense of outrage at his former master, his dis-
satisfaction with his status as a house-elf, his joy at being released from
slavery in Chamber – all these turn out to be uncharacteristic of house-
elves, a sort of aberration. Everything that the reader may have gleaned
about house-elves from Chamber is reversed in Goblet. House-elves, all
those in the know (Hagrid, Ron) firmly affirm, are ‘natural’ slaves, it
simply is their species-condition.
The only character in Goblet who is uneasy with these revelations is
Hermione. Hermione’s reservations spring not so much from her know-
ledge of Dobby’s treatment by the Malfoys (villainous at the best of
times, nothing better could be expected of them), but as a witness of
Winky’s treatment by Mr. Crouch (a stalwart of the prevailing order
and at the heart of the establishment) and Mr. Diggory. Mr. Crouch’s
dismissal of Winky and Winky’s humiliation enfuriate Hermione (Goblet
125). As a result Hermione tries to set up a Society for the Promotion of
Elfish Welfare (with the unfortunate acronym S.P.E.W.), to secure fair
wages and working conditions, and in the longer term to change the
law and get an elf into the Department for the Regulation and Control of
Magical Creatures (Goblet 198). S.P.E.W. however doesn’t find any
followers and Hermione’s efforts in this direction make her the butt of
her friends’ jokes (Goblet 320, for example). Clearly, all except Hermione
are comfortable with the ‘natural’ slavery of the house-elves.
How do these developments in the delineation of house-elves and
their place in Magic society impinge upon, if at all, concerns of readers
in our world? The presentation of Dobby’s plight in Chamber (and
Wormwood’s character in Prisoner) could be extrapolated from the
Magic world context to make sense in our (social and political) world in
ways that are outlined above. But how may readers in our world
respond to the reversals that are made in the depiction of house-elves in

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Goblet? These appear to touch upon matters (servitude, slavery, domin-

ation, natural proclivities) that should have social and political relevance
in our world, and that ought to be socially and politically suggestive in
our world and enable readers to respond accordingly. This however
does not happen quite as smoothly as might be expected. There are, it
seems to me, two different and equally unsatisfactory responses to this

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that are likely:

1 That in fact the house-elves as described in Goblet are within an area

of the purely imaginary without any social and political equivalence
in our world. For reasons that I have outlined in Part I, this seems to
be a most unlikely possibility – but that is one unsatisfactory way of
dealing with the presentation of house-elves in Goblet. There are, of
course, historical phases in almost all societies when slavery had been
institutionalized and experienced; but it is a reasonable consensus of
our time that there are no ‘natural’ slaves, and if bonded labour
continues to occur anywhere (as it does) it is a reprehensible social
malaise rather than a naturally determined affair. To speculate about
any group that is predeterminedly born to slavery through the
course of nature is to speculate about something for which there is no
social and political analogue in our world – it is merely a matter of
remote theoretical and (in this case) fictional interest, and no more.
The house-elves may recall another rather more obviously serious (in
a social and political sense) literary speculation of this sort in Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World. In the Brave New World different classes
are genetically selected, cloned and then brainwashed to serve certain
preordained roles in society. These classes are categorized from Alpha
to Epsilon, where Alpha and Beta are the brightest and meant for
intellectual labour and the Delta, Gamma and Epsilon are the dimmest
and directed towards routine menial work. It so happens that the
Alpha and Beta are almost invariably white, and all the Alpha are
male, and the Gamma and Epsilon are predominantly black – but
that’s a different strand from the one that I am interested in here,
not to be pursued now. Anyway, the position of the Delta, Gamma
and Epsilon are not unlike that of the house-elves in Magic world;
and like Hermione in Goblet, the Savage (a main protagonist) in Brave
New World tries to arouse a group of Deltas to higher aspirations and
fails miserably.2 There may be some resemblance here, but the dif-
ference is far more material. The Deltas, etc. of the Brave New World
are engineered to be what they are; the speculation about their pre-
ordained role becomes effectively a socially and politically relevant

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 Servants and Slaves 119

(to our world) consideration of the dystopic possibilities of unconsid-

ered technological development. The house-elves of the Harry Potter
novels are, on the other hand, naturally such as they are – as a species –
and do not quite fit into that variety of futuristic reflection on the
condition of our world.
2 That the house-elves are an obviously exaggerated aspect of something

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that does pertain to our world – namely, natural inequality – maybe
another way of coming to grips with their appearance in Goblet. The
house-elves are clearly exaggerated: they have caricature appearances
(enormous eyes, mismatched socks, bouncing around and bashing
themselves up like any Disney animated character), and they speak
in clichés (with an enormous density of ‘sirs’, and those childish verbal
tics or upper-class-view-of-working-class syntax). So too their condition
of being natural slaves is an exaggerated one, just another way of
heightening interest or bringing the obvious to attention by making
it appear strange. What they do help us think about despite the
exaggerations are the implications of natural inequalities that are
amply in evidence in our world (some people are born stronger and
others weaker, some people are more or less intelligent than others,
different people have different genetically ingrained aptitudes, etc.).
But having drawn the argument plausibly this far I must confess that
I can’t see how to take it any further. Natural inequalities undoubtedly
are a condition of our world but it is not incumbent on us to accept
these if they prove to be disadvantageous. By and large in our world
nurture and determination can overcome natural inequalities which
are disadvantageous; clearly in our world people do not necessarily
give in to or accept naturally preordained roles – even when there
may be some social or political predisposition to doing so. The
house-elves are presented as too restrictively bound by their species-
condition of servitude. Also the house-elves are strongly bound to
their nature-given collective identity, whereas nature-given human
differences can primarily be sensibly and unambiguously discerned
among individuals. The approach that, in other words, may try to find
this sort of our world relevance in the house-elves in Goblet is unlikely
to get very far.

These unsatisfactory responses from the perspective of our world to the

presentation of house-elves, especially in Goblet, actually derive from
a deep-seated contradiction within that presentation itself. Ultimately,
readers are unlikely to be able to find any social and political relevance
apropos the house-elves in Goblet – despite apparent promise – because

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they cannot really be understood at all in our world: there are unresolv-
able problems with the manner in which nature and ability are played
against each other in the presentation of house-elves. That Hermione
momentarily thinks of Winky as ‘human’ is no accident: apart from
their naturally determined role of being slaves as a species there is little
to distinguish them from humans. Both Dobby and Winky show moral

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discrimination, rational ability, emotional attachments, strong feelings,
an extraordinary sense of responsibility, an ability to express themselves
adequately – and insofar as having magical power is human too in the
Magic world, house-elves also have magical ability. It is simply irrational
that with these characteristics house-elves can be so different from
humans in only that one respect, in accepting unconditional slavery
without resentment. To resent unconditional servitude, to wish for fairness,
to aspire for independence of action and thought, to strive for recognition are
the rational outcomes of the condition of being human in exactly the ways
that the house-elves are. If all those human qualities exist in house-elves
then the desire for fairness, independence, recognition, etc. would have
to rationally follow. I hardly need to site the prodigious amount of political
thinking starting from Plato’s Republic that rests on this understanding.
And here is the crux of the matter: house-elves can use their humanness
to reach rational human conclusions (how can they not? they are rational);
not only are they human, they are aware of being human. This was the
impression readers are likely to have gleaned from the presentation of
Dobby in Chamber, and it made Dobby understandable. The reversal in
the presentation of house-elves in Goblet makes both the house-elves
incomprehensible as a species and Dobby incomprehensible as an
individual house-elf. The natural predetermination to servitude is so
completely arbitrary, so completely at odds with the human characteris-
tics of the house-elves, so contradictory to the possibilities that Dobby’s
character had revealed, that it is impossible to reconcile all these ele-
ments into a satisfactory whole. Hermione’s is in fact the only under-
standable reaction within Magic world that is imaginable, and that it is
presented as an eccentricity and taken as an eccentricity by all around
her either shows that the Magic world is incomprehensibly irrational
from any our world perspective, or that the picture is flawed in its
presentation.
I do not think these contradictions can be removed or reconciled, but
I do think they can be explained further.

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16
The Question of Class

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I have been edging towards the issue of social class – one that, in the
context of the Harry Potter books, has attracted some attention – for
a while now. In the previous chapter I have noted that the educational
experience of Magic world is apt to be viewed in our world as being
specific to a certain social class. This has in fact been the main thrust of
observations about class attitudes in the Harry Potter novels, and to this
I return later in this chapter. In the previous chapter I have also com-
mented on the manner in which the house-elves’ class characteristics
(being servants, the kind of treatment they receive, the spaces they
inhabit, their way of speaking, etc.) is made uneasily coextensive with
their species-condition of servility. This latter observation arguably has
a bearing both on prevailing conceptualizations of class in our world
and (to some extent) on the social and political implications of the
reception accorded to the Harry Potter novels.
The analytical efficacy of the concept of social class is naturally indel-
ibly associated with Marxist theory. For classical Marxists, the manner
in which the productive and economic relations in different societies
are organized both devolve into and derive from the relations between
different social classes; changes in such organization (different phases
of societal development from division of labour to capitalism) are pri-
marily explicable in terms of conflicts between classes and the attempt
of dominant classes to preserve their position; social upheavals (crises
in capitalism) and transformations (proletariat revolutions) become
universally imminent because of class conflicts; every aspect of human
culture and expression that is there to be examined has an explanation
in implicit or explicit class attitudes; and the final endeavour of societal
development should be towards classlessness. In effect, class becomes
a central and universal analytical category in Marxist thinking. Not

121

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unnaturally, those who disagreed with Marxist analysis, and also those
who have sought to reform Marxist theory to keep up with seismic
changes that early Marxists couldn’t have anticipated, have eventually
diluted the analytical efficacy of the category of social class. Gradually,
now that Marxist thinking has either been modified to the extent of
becoming transformed itself or has been superseded by a plethora

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of other modes of sociological analysis, the universal air and analytical
efficacy of the idea of social class has almost disappeared. To a large
extent social class is now regarded as only one social category (to do
with economic and culturally differentiated strata) amongst others (to
which they may or may not be necessarily related), like ethnicity, caste,
gender or sexuality-based categories. Some have even declared the
demise of class analysis as a useful category.1 If social class lingers in
academic research, it is mainly in terms of its ambiguities: for example,
the problems of negotiating between the analysis of gender and class
perception, the ambiguities in assessing class position and individual
position, the difficulties of using class analysis to explain social mobility. 2
And yet, in the midst of all that, the effects of the Marxist legacy lingers;
so profound and powerful has the impact of Marxism been on every
aspect of social and political life that the sense of universality of social
classes is unthinkingly retained, the language of class analysis has
become an unthinking part of language itself, the unthinking evocation
of social classes always equally unthinkingly seems meaningful. But the
unthinking persistence of the idea of class, compounded by a thinking
proclivity to focus on its ambiguities, means that there is often a great
deal of fuzziness and confusion when it appears.
Insofar as social class is treated in the Harry Potter books, and also
often insofar as readers of these talk about social classes, it seems to me
that such fuzziness and confusion is manifested. It seems to me that the
fact that the class characteristics (pertinent to that part of the working
class which is involved in domestic labour) of house-elves is given as
a species characteristic is due to this confusion. Servitude makes sense
in our world primarily as a matter of class-based social organization
(which is related, however remotely, to the classical Marxist approach):
it involves stratifications (often provisional and fluid) in society according
to labour and economic relations, it entails formal social agreements
(responsibility and limitations of authority, for instance, and fairness of
compensation) and informal social understanding (privileges of behaviour
and status) in accordance with that. As we have seen in the previous
chapter, the Harry Potter books do two things of interest in this context.
One, some kinds of unfair consequences of such class divisions (such as

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 The Question of Class 123

the ill-treatment of servants) is dislocated from class analysis and turned

into matters of individual morality. Thus, house-elves are treated badly
not because they are particularly vulnerable to bad treatment by dint of
their class location, but because some people are bad. Two, the symptoms
of class standing, which in our world can be explained in terms of the
material social factors underlying class division, are dislocated from the

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concept of class and turned into endemic or inborn characteristics.
Thus house-elves are not servile because of the way society is organized,
they are born servile. These dislocations effectively mean that, in fact,
the Harry Potter books have not presented the house-elves as in any
understandable way anything to do with social classes at all. Yet, unques-
tionably, to any reader the house-elves would inevitably appear to be
evocative of class divisions. The contradiction is irreparable.
As I have observed already, it is impossible to make any political and
social sense in our world of the house-elves’ position in Magic world.
But – and here’s the point of the above argument – we are tempted to,
because in a symptomatic fashion the house-elves are recognizably very
like servants in certain exploitative class-dominated societies of our time.
However, if we did we would, like Hermione, inevitably be making fools
of ourselves in Magic world. How is this temptation that is so alluringly
held out to and yet so precipitately withdrawn from those who object
to exploitative forms of class inequality to be interpreted? I don’t know –
but I can hazard a guess at how it may be unthinkingly received.
Don’t meddle with what appears to you to be a matter of inequality
between and exploitation among social classes, may be a reasonable
unthinking inference. However counter-intuitively, it appears to be
implied, what you think of as social class characteristics may be bio-
genetic. And related to that, political resistance to perceived inequalities
is best conducted without any hope of social reconstruction or change,
but as a matter of moral virtue (this is what Hermione needs to learn).
It should be conducted as Mr. Weasley, despite his unquestionable
superiority, resists any desire to put down Muggles (or broadly, as lib-
eral race politics is understood in the Harry Potter books). Or perhaps,
given that the house-elves are bound by a species-condition of servility
(despite everything no evidence of reproduction with humans, but that’s
enough), as some sort of animal rights campaign.
To take such an inference seriously would, I feel, be patently absurd –
but then, given the prevailing confusions about the category of social
class itself, and given the manner in which even thinking sociological
approaches have obfuscated the distinctions between class analysis and
gender or race or ethnicity based analyses, consent for such an inference

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from the Harry Potter books would probably not be too outlandish in
our world. The fact that there has been so little mention of the curious
phenomenon of the house-elves in the Harry Potter books, that this
clearly disruptive imagining has passed by readers so smoothly, suggests
that there has at least been tacit consent for it. There has at least been
consent enough for the disruptive nature of the house-elves presentation

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not to have made a sufficient impact. That is a disquieting thought.
If house-elves have not made much of an impact vis-à-vis the implica-
tions for social classes, the presentation of Hogwarts as an educational
institution has. A tiny comment about schooling arrangements for
Dudley and Harry in Stone showed that if not in Magic world at least in
Muggle world some symptoms of class divisions are apparent with
regard to educational affiliations. Though it is clear that all schools in
Magic world, not least Hogwarts, are only apparently very similar to
old-fashioned English boarding schools, and do not discriminate
according to class, critical unease about the impact of such imagined
institutions on the class-ridden societies of our world (certainly Britain)
has been consistently expressed. Here’s such a characteristic comment,
in this instance by Karl Miller:

Why should the Potter stories not be about English boarding schools,
or seem so little Scottish or so exclusive of the poor? This too, after
all, has been familiar ground in children’s literature, and I am not
attempting to deplore what happens in J.K. Rowling’s academy. But
there is a bitter irony in the thought of her stories being, as they are,
eagerly read in the state educational system, currently underfunded
and in trouble. A recruitment crisis of unprecedented dimensions has
hit state schools, whose teachers have been demonized by a Labour
government unmoved by the two-tier schooling which must count
as one of the chief sources of contemporary class division and social
desolation. Public-school teachers are paid more, and have, as Hogwarts
indicates, more time to devote to the children whom they are
grooming for stardom. State-school readers of Harry Potter are look-
ing at a place which must seem very like and very unlike the schools
they attend.3

This statement, in itself, of course simply uses the Harry Potter books as
an excuse to air some well-founded discontent with the educational
system in Britain. But it echoes the sort of thing that has been said most
often about these book in relation to concern about class division. The
thing that interests me is not that such (perfectly justified) class concerns

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 The Question of Class 125

about education are expressed in the context of reading the Harry Potter
books, but that this seems to be almost the only kind of class-related
concern that is routinely expressed in this context. The reasons for that
also, it seems to me, lie in the background of class analysis and the
prevailing attitudes to social class that I have outlined above.
To relate a concern with social class unthinkingly and single-mindedly

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to the British boarding school (which is what occurs in most such
readings of the Harry Potter books) is to reduce it from a broad-based
(if not universal) analytical category to a particular cultural symptom.
This suits the prevailing dilution of the social class as an analytically
efficacious category that I have described above. Most critics who deplore
the class attitudes that are intentionally or otherwise conveyed in the
depiction of Hogwarts, assume that they are talking about a specifically
British – or rather English – cultural phenomenon. Their criticisms
therefore cannot be regarded as directed against inequality in social
classes per se, but against the particular English kind of class-consciousness
that is rooted in the public school/state school divide. Social class thus
reduced to a specific cultural symptom is a far less politically worrying
phenomenon, a narrowly circumscribed matter. Of the critics who have
commented on class vis-à-vis the Harry Potter books the one who seems
to do this in the most self-conscious (and therefore the most productive)
fashion is Andrew Blake. Since Blake’s analysis is, as I have observed,
essentially a fitting of the Harry Potter phenomenon into an English
cultural landscape in the 1990s, his reduction of social class to a pecu-
liarly English cultural phenomenon is a natural consequence:

Inheritance is explored at Hogwarts in another, very English, way –

the stories feature class differences and snobberies. Not all children
at Hogwarts are social equals, and neither are their parents (which is
one reason why this is not just another public school story). Many
people have noticed that the school houses map on to the class system,
with the worthy workers (Hufflepuff), the brave, stolidly reliable lower
middle class (Gryffindor), and the professional and intellectual middle
class (Ravenclaw). At the top of the tree, on Harry’s arrival, we have
Slytherin, where we find wicked aristocrats, those stock baddies of
the public school stories. 4

The full import of Blake’s discernment of a peculiarly English class

organization in Hogwarts can be understood if his placement (again in
a typically English cultural code related to class) of Harry as a ‘Home
Counties suburban child’5 is inserted into the picture. For Blake, therefore,

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the English class-consciousness that is particularly encoded in the

presentation of Hogwarts becomes a cultural commodity, a New Labour
branding of Englishness, for global consumption.
Blake’s is an attractive argument, but it is confined to his focus. As far
as this text-to-world analysis goes it is difficult to affirm that the global
euphoria about the Harry Potter books, in many different languages and

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vastly different social and cultural contexts, occurs because a well-
packaged brand of Englishness is discerned in them. Insofar as it has
been consumed as such, it must be primarily in Britain where such
cultural codifications are received most intelligently, perhaps in the US
and other past colonies (only to an aware elite). Some critics, including
Zipes, have suggested that in fact in the United States Harry Potter
enthusiasts are primarily from such an elite background, 6 but there isn’t
enough evidence to support this, and the extensive sales figures there
and elsewhere belie the argument. It seems to me very likely that if such
commodification of English class-consciousness through Hogwarts has
played a role in the books’ success it is because some readers were predis-
posed to perceiving it. That is one social and political effect to do with
reading Harry Potter books with an awareness of social class. But there
must be others.
Ultimately, the onus of class-sensitive reading is squarely located in
specifically culturally ensconced readers, who can discern class codes
according to their proclivities. As far as the text-to-world methodology
goes this much can be affirmed: the Harry Potter books evidence several
different class related themes that are confused and inconsistent. Of
these I have touched upon two here – in the presentation of house-elves
(which has wider theoretical implications apropos understanding social
class) and in the description of Hogwarts (at best a superficial association
with the specifically English cultural phenomenon of class consciousness).
If the former has been disregarded and the latter extensively discussed,
it is because readers have unthinkingly brought our world perspectives
into play.

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17
Desire

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An article by Christine Schoefer, ‘Harry Potter’s Girl Trouble’, in Salon
Magazine had argued plausibly that the Harry Potter novels uncritically
present a male-dominated society with conventional assumptions
regarding women. The basic argument is best given in her introductory
statement:

Harry’s fictional realm of magic and wizardry perfectly mirrors the

conventional assumption that men do and should run the world.
From the beginning of the first Potter book, it is men and boys,
wizards and sorcerers, who catch our attention by dominating the
scenes and the action. Harry, of course, plays the lead. In his epic
struggle with the forces of darkness – the evil wizard Voldemort and
his male supporters – Harry is supported by the dignified wizard
Dumbledore and a colorful cast of male characters. Girls, when they
are not downright silly or unlikable, are helpers, enablers and instru-
ments. No girl is brilliantly heroic the way Harry is, no woman is
experienced and wise like Professor Dumbledore. In fact, the range of
female personalities is so limited that neither women nor girls play
on the side of evil. 1

This view was broadly supported by Zipes, 2 as I have indicated above,

but the general reaction at the time was that this was a rather fussy femi-
nist stance. 3 It was pointed out that the author of the Harry Potter books
is a woman and is surely cognisant of the situation of women, that
there are various significant roles that are in fact given to women
(including being head of a Hogwarts house, and being a Quidditch
Seeker), that this is no more than a reflection of the sad reality that
attaches to our world, that this has no effect on children’s perceptions

127

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128 Re-Reading Harry Potter

of gender relations and there is no evidence that it makes girl readers

uncomfortable (indeed more girls and women read Harry Potters than
boys and men), that giving central roles to women in fiction is hardly
a panacea for the gender inequalities that dog our world, and that this
is taking the novels too seriously when they are actually just good fun
for young readers. I have discussed the unthinkingness that is manifest

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in most of such reactions already, and I do think that Christine Schoefer’s
arguments are significantly stronger than those of her retractors. However,
I do not intend to revisit those arguments here again, or dwell particularly
on gender representation. I mention this mainly to lead on to a related
issue – not to dwell on gender representation but to discuss briefly the
representation of relations and desire between men and women (desire
in the Harry Potter novels is uncontroversially heterosexual).
A focus on two thematic strains in Chamber and Goblet respectively
helps both to delimit this discussion and present an indicative point of
comparison. Gilderoy Lockhardt in Chamber is presented as being pretty
much universally appealing to girls and women (and quite the opposite
to boys and men); and the Veela in Goblet, especially the part-Veela
Fleur Delacour, embody the universally appealing to men. The appeal
in both cases is sexual (heterosexual); they embody something essential
to female desire and male desire – something that is not pertinent to
particular individuals, but applies to men and women irrespective of
individual personalities. There are also, of course, several individual
male–female relationships depicted in the Harry Potter novels: Ginny’s
affection for Harry, Harry’s crush on Cho Chang, Cho Chang’s attrac-
tion to Diggory, Percy’s affair with Penelope, Hermione’s and Krum’s
affection for each other, Hagrid’s passion for Madame Maxime, and
Ron’s growing love–hate relationship with Hermione. These are pre-
dictably developed, with all the expected intractability and yet familiarity
of individual romances. But the essential sexual appeal embodied in
Lockhart and the Veela (Fleur) is food for contemplation because it is
presented as essential, something that none of the characters mentioned
can escape from – including Hermione (the most discerning and intelli-
gent) and Mrs. Weasley (the most matronly) with regard to Lockhart,
and absolutely all the boys and men with regard to the Veela.
That almost universally desirable gendered objects can be construed
obviously suggests that heterosexual desire can be dislocated from the
bonds of individual relationships and personalities. Heterosexual desire
is given as a common denominator in all men and women that can be
triggered by certain qualities rather than certain personalities, qualities
that can be isolated and concentrated or embodied in Lockhart and the

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 Desire 129

Veela. What precise relationship this common denominator has on spe-

cific individual relationships (how come certain men feel greater sexual
desire for certain women and vice versa and none at all for others?) is
left unclear. Concentrating heterosexual desire in certain universally
appealing objects has, in the Harry Potter novels, the effect of removing
that element from individual relationships. However Harry may feel

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about Cho Chang, or other boys about specific girls, they would inevit-
ably be drawn to the universal appeal and desirability of the Veela. This
has the effect of diminishing the sexual content of Harry’s attraction to
Cho Chang, and it is not unremarkable that all the individual relationships
that are developed studiously avoid physical contact or any evidence of
sexual attraction. There are individual affinities (physical stature for
Hagrid and Madame Maxime, in spirit among seekers like Cho Chang
and Harry, in combativeness between Hermione and Ron or Krum, and
so on) but sexual desire is something else.
It is more Gilderoy Lockhart’s image, carefully constructed and
relentlessly advertised by him, than his person that appeals to women.
The image (his alleged exploits in his books, his photograph on the
cover) makes Mrs. Weasley a blushing admirer (Chamber 32), brings
a large number of witches to his book signings (Chamber 48–9), keeps
Hermione glued to his most extravagant narcissistic displays. So when
Lockhart sets his class a quiz of 54 questions on himself and proceeds to
comment on their answers Ron stares at Lockhart in disbelief; Seamus
Finnigan and Dean Thomas shake with silent laughter; but Hermione
listens to him intensely, and starts when he mentions her name
(Chamber 78). Even when Lockhart messes up with the Cornish Pixies
and leaves Hermione, Harry and Ron to clear up after him, Hermione is
inclined to defend him against the others’ mockery (Chamber 80). It is
the image – the hero of his books juxtaposed on to his own confident
and undeterred (despite continuous blunders) appearance – that attracts
women. This is consistent with other observations in the Harry Potter
books. The idea of heroism seems to be one of the qualities that appeal
to women generally: Harry (a true hero) has his own little flock of
female admirers (Ginny, and those who ask him to the Yule Ball, for
instance [Goblet 339]); and Krum (a Quidditch hero) is almost continu-
ously followed around by an admiring gaggle of girls. What Lockhart
had managed was to concentrate the quality of heroism – a lot of different
heroes’ heroism (Chamber 220) – into his own image, and the result is
the sexual irresistibility of that image to women. But Lockhart is also
a salutary reminder that images are insubstantial, and that rather makes
female desire insubstantial and manipulable too.

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The Veela are a somewhat different and more immediately effective

trigger of sexual desire for men than Gilderoy Lockhart the fictional
hero is for women. When Harry (this once simply the quintessential
male and no more) first sees them on the Quidditch World Cup pitch
he thinks they are most beautiful women he had ever seen. The sight
subsumes his awareness of the world: ‘Harry’s mind had gone completely

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and blissfully blank. All that mattered in the world was that he kept
watching the Veela.’ Gradually this loss of awareness is complemented
by a desire for self-promotion that reaches the point where Harry begins
to contemplate suicide by jumping from the box into the stadium as
a grand attention-grabbing gesture (Goblet 93–4). Fortunately he is brought
back to his senses by an unimpressed Hermione (just as boys aren’t
affected by Lockhardt, girls are immune to the Veela – the charm
doesn’t work on the same sex). In brief, the Veela are purely physical
manifestations of ideally beautiful women – they are seen and watched.
The desire they trigger among men is one of a complete suspension of
awareness of others, and an absolute need to assert oneself (to be seen
in return). The pure physical manifestation that inevitably grips the
male gaze and erases every other presence in the vicinity – the com-
pletely crystallized object that puts everything else out of focus – is the
trigger of male sexual desire. This too is consistent with other episodes
in Goblet, such as Ron’s asking Fleur to accompany him to the Yule Ball:

‘I don’t know what made me do it!’ Ron gasped again, ‘What was
I playing at? There were people – all around – I’ve gone mad – everyone
watching! I was just walking past her in the Entrance Hall – she was
standing there talking to Diggory – and it sort of came over me – and
I asked her!’ (Goblet 347)

The appeal of the purely crystallized physical sight of the Veela is

evidently just as insubstantial as that of (on a lower key of intensity)
Lockhart on women. It is transient. The suspended awareness of others
and surroundings, the period for which the mind grows blank and bliss-
ful, is finite. When the larger reality reinserts itself there is always an
awakening, and male sexual desire becomes no more than a transitory
madness.
The relegation of sexual desire – whether male or female – into the
realm of the insubstantial but effective, where automatic and implicitly
irrational or thoughtless reaction is ensconced, in Magic world
rebounds into and bounces away from attitudes towards sexual desire in
our world. In Magic world the essentiality of sexual desire, as well as its

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 Desire 131

transience and insubstantiality, can be confirmed in magical fashion by

the concretization of the Veela and by the complete dissociation
between Lockhart the hero and Lockhart the incompetent wizard. In
Magic world this essential quality of sexual desire can itself be shown to
be universal and unambiguously effective. The Magic world confirms
that that is just the way sexual desire is: it is manifestly so, it does not

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need to be agonized over further, or examined more closely. In our
world sexual desire has a more troubled and ambiguous history. Several
cultures (especially in the West) in our world have a long history of
assuming an attitude towards sexual desire that chimes in with what
seems to be unambiguously true and magically manifest in Magic world:
sexual desire as insubstantial and transitory, effective in an undesirable
manner, to be more or less excluded from our understanding of individ-
ual relationships except in a functional or instrumental fashion, and
certainly to be smothered out of sight as far as institutional social and
political concerns go. There is now also a fairly substantial understanding
of the fact that sexual desire does not unambiguously fall in with this
attitude; that in reality sexual desire seeps into pretty much every aspect
of human existence, including social and political domains. Literary
expressions that have both encompassed and subverted the social and
political attitudes of the times they were concerned with most effectively
from Satyricon to Gargantua and Pantagruel to Restoration Comedies to
Ulysses and onwards have mined into the quirks of sexual desire glee-
fully. One of Freud’s controversial achievements was the demonstration
that sexual desire could lie underneath almost every kind of human
expression and relationship, from those to do with infants and their
development, to those to do with societal and political organization,
to daily slippages and dreams and high art. Michel Foucault’s History of
Sexuality influentially demonstrated how sexual desire lies at the heart
of social discourses and the body-politic of a range of historical contexts;
and since then one of the apparently most ostentatiously strait-laced
historical periods in Britain (the Victorian) has been intensively
researched to reveal a perfect morass of garrulity and power-play
explicitly connected to sexual desire.4 Several strands of the women’s
movement especially after second-wave feminism, and the gay movement
after the Stonewall riots, have brought sexual desire squarely and
explicitly and persuasively into the mainstream of political activism.
The unambiguously manifest and confirmable essentiality and insub-
stantiality and transience of sexual desire in the Magic world may
unthinkingly appear to chime in with attitudes that have been and still
are widely prevalent in our world; but in our world these are neither

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unambiguously manifest nor confirmable. On the contrary, it is steadily

becoming clearer and better understood that there is no essential form to
sexual desire (sexual desire is culturally as well as biologically located),
that sexual desire is ubiquitous and permanent in different forms, that
it is substantially in the sphere of social and political effects rather than
being a sort of blind madness.

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18
The Magic System of Advertising

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Advertising, in its modern forms . . . operates to preserve the
consumption ideal from the criticism inexorably made of it by
experience. If the consumption of individual goods leaves that
whole area of human need unsatisfied, the attempt is made, by
magic, to associate this consumption with human desires to which it
has no real reference. You do not only buy an object: you buy social
respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, power to control
your environment. The magic obscures the real sources of general
satisfaction because their discovery would involve radical change in
the whole common way of life.
Of course, when a magical pattern has become established in a soci-
ety, it is capable of some real if limited success. Many people will
indeed look twice at you, upgrade you, upmarket you, respond to
your displayed signals, if you made the right purchases within a system
of meanings to which you are all trained. Thus the fantasy seems to
be validated, at a personal level, but only at the cost of preserving the
general unreality which it obscures: the real failures of the society
which however are not easily traced to this pattern. 1

The quotation, making an observation the truth of which is largely self-

evident in our world, is from Raymond Williams’s essay ‘Advertising:
The Magic System’. In the literally magical Magic world of the Harry
Potter novels advertising plays a significant role that seems to gesture
towards the market phenomenon that these novels have engendered.
The link drawn here from the fictional Magic world (presented in the
Harry Potter novels) to our world (where the Harry Potter phenomenon
takes place) may seem tenuous – but the temptation to make it is itself
worthy of discussion.

133

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The Harry Potter phenomenon has naturally been understood primarily

in terms of the hype culture of our world, 2 in which the content and
utility of the product is drowned in precisely what Williams sees as the
magic of advertising – a surfeit of lifestyle associations and codes. But
the connection between the content of the Harry Potter novels and the
hype-induced phenomenon has been made, notably in a review by

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Stephen Brown for, interestingly, the Journal of Marketing:

Although many readers might be tempted to dismiss Harry Potter as

a passing marketing fad, yet another in a long line of preteen obses-
sions, it is precipitate so to do. Apart from the inspiration that many
cutting-edge management commentators are drawing from kiddie
culture, Harry Potter is particularly pertinent to the contemporary
marketing condition. The books, after all, are as much about marketing
as the outcome of marketing. They deal with marketing matters,
they are replete with marketing artifacts, they contain analyses of
marketplace phenomena, and they hold the solution to an ancient
marketing mystery. The books are not merely a marketing masterpiece,
they are a marketing master class.3

The review goes on to comment on the glee with which magical

consumables (sweets, books, pets, broomsticks, and other objects) – often
displayed in different magical shop windows – are described in the Harry
Potter books; draw attention to the large number of catchy, advertisement-
inspired names and phrases that are rattled off when ever the opportun-
ity presents itself; and observe the manner in which some of these have
flowed smoothly into the methods through which the Harry Potter
books were marketed and Harry Potter-inspired consumables were realized
in our world. The ‘solution to an ancient marketing mystery’ that
Brown mentions above I come back to soon.
A close examination of some of the more memorable and detailed
advertisement-related motifs in the Harry Potter books may give some
indication of the effect with which advertisements are used there. I lead
up to this after setting the scene, so to say.
Harry’s introduction to the Magic world is also an introduction to
the Magic marketplace of Diagon Alley and the wizard Gringotts bank.
He glimpses the cauldron shop and the owl emporium fleetingly before
being taken to the bank by Hagrid where there’s an inheritance of
coins stashed away for him (Stone 58). Harry grabs some and goes shop-
ping. The bank and the marketplace mark the Magic world, much like
our world, as one that subscribes to recognizable political-economic

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principles. The details of the political-economy of Magic world – the

relations between labour (however magically underpinned), management/
ownership of means of production, production, distribution, demand,
consumption, and the regulations that pertain to Magic production-
consumption – are however obscured by the focus on Harry’s experi-
ences. There is a vague sense of the Magic world being a pre-industrial

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society where hard money lies in vaults, small retailers hold sway in
the marketplace, and products seem to be largely locally produced
(there is no evidence of international wizard trading). But that is but
a hazy view of the matter. The focus on Harry ensures that every kind
of detail about the political economy of Magic world is obscured
because he is simply and carelessly removed from them. Harry inherits
a fortune. He can buy, without a worry, pretty much anything he
wants. As it happens he doesn’t even have to do that, because he just
keeps being given the most desirable things without having to lift
a finger (the best broomsticks in the market, an invisibility cloak, the
Marauder’s Map, useful birthday presents from his not too well-off
friends). Harry is the consumer’s dream: he can buy and buy and take
and take without having to work or fret about financial resources.
Harry is also the capitalist’s dream: someone whose entire sense of the
world – the Magic world – is sieved through impressions gathered in
the marketplace while having plenty of money in his pocket. Harry
enters the market of Diagon Alley with a clean slate as far as impres-
sions of the Magic world go; he leaves the market with a formative
impression of the Magic world which all comes from the bank and the
shops. Some of his friends are not so fortunate. The Weasleys are
clearly not as well off (the butt of the Malfoys’ snobbery for that reason)
and the Weasley children often have to do with second-hand things;
the Weasleys have to think twice before buying things. Hermione’s
parents are Muggles and have to exchange Muggle-money for wizard-
money: details of these transactions might have given readers in our
world a clear sense of the relative worth of things. Dobby’s pay and
life-style at Hogwarts are frugal: but we don’t really know what
unemployment may mean for a house-elf (starvation? homelessness?).
More attention to such details may have revealed more of the political-
economical relations of Magic world. Harry is ideally placed not to
have to dwell on these. However, it is reasonably clear that the political-
economic arrangement of Magic world is such that it is recognizable in
our world: its principles might have been unravelled and turned out to
be the same as those that have pertained or sometimes still pertain in
our world. In political-economic terms Magic world is simply a magically

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enhanced version of some context of our world, probably a pre-industrial

context.
One of the points that Williams makes in the essay quoted above is
that advertising developed to its modern level, acquiring those magical
qualities (of associating consumer items with life-styles, for instance)
only as industrial and post-industrial capitalism developed. Under less

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complex political-economic conditions advertising tended to be simply
declarative and descriptive. What may strike the reader about the
advertisements of Magic world is that they are highly developed and
sophisticated examples of their kind, not really in keeping with the pre-
industrial environment of the marketplace and bank. These advertise-
ments are given in unusual detail: while every other insight into the
political economy of Magic world is carefully obscured, the high devel-
opment of advertising is emphatically brought to attention by complete
quotations from several of these. Again, it is the focus on Harry that
enables this even while obscuring Magic economic relations: since
Harry’s approach to the Magic world is mediated by his exposure to the
bank and market, since Harry is the ideal consumer in several senses,
his magical sensibilities seem to be especially honed to Magic advertise-
ments. He notices them and absorbs them, just as he notices the brand
names of things. To the blasé consumers of our world advertisements
are so familiar that we absorb their impact without quite noticing it; to
Harry advertisements are an entry into Magic world, he studies them
and absorbs them with care. What may readers infer from the Magic
world advertisements that are given in the Harry Potter books?
Broomsticks figure significantly in Harry’s entry into and establish-
ment within Magic world (virtuoso broomstick rider and the youngest
Quidditch Seeker ever at Hogwarts), and broomsticks naturally are the
centre of the language of advertising in the Harry Potter books. In Stone
it is the possession of the Nimbus Two Thousand broomstick that
magically endows on Harry an enviable status at Hogwarts (even Malfoy
is impressed). The status clearly comes because the Nimbus Two Thousand
is a status symbol; all the students at Hogwarts know of it by reputation,
the reputation has something to do with advertisements. The very way
in which they think about it and talk about its packaging and perform-
ance is reminiscent of advertisements, and replete with advertisement-
induced desires. There is the association with status involved: ‘“It’s not any
old broomstick,” [Ron] said, “it’s a Nimbus Two Thousand. . . . . Comets
looks flashy, but they’re not in the same league as the Nimbus” ’
(Stone 122). The fetishistic satisfaction of possessiveness is described:
‘Even Harry, who knew nothing about the different brooms, thought it
looked wonderful. Sleek and shiny, with a mahogany handle, it had

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a long tail of neat, straight twigs and Nimbus Two Thousand written in
gold near the top’ (Stone 123). There is the association with being in
control: ‘What a feeling – he swooped in and out of goalposts and then
sped up and down the pitch. The Nimbus Two Thousand turned wher-
ever he wanted at his lightest touch’ (Stone 123). By Chamber however
Harry’s Nimbus Two Thousand has been superseded by a superior

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model – the Nimbus Two Thousand and One. The entire Slytherin team
acquires these thanks to Mr. Malfoy’s generosity, and the Slytherin cap-
tain, Flint, gloats about these in recognizably advertising terms (playing
with words and throwing in advertising clichés): ‘Very latest model.
Only came out last month,’ said Flint carelessly, flicking a speck of
dust from the end of his own. ‘I believe it outstrips the old Two Thou-
sand series by a considerable amount. As for the old Cleansweeps,’ he
smiled nastily at Fred and George, who were both clutching Cleansweep
Fives, ‘sweeps the board with them.’ (Chamber 86). Luckily it is not long
before, in Prisoner, a superior model makes its appearance in the market
– The Firebolt – and here the advertisement is given verbatim:

This state-of-the-art racing broom sports a streamlined, superfine handle

of ash, treated with a diamond-hard polish, and hand-numbered with its
own registration number. Each individually selected birch twig in the
broomtail has been honed to aerodynamic perfection, giving the Firebolt
unsurpassable balance and pinpoint precision. The Firebolt has an acceler-
ation of 0–150 miles an hour in ten seconds and incorporates an unbreakable
braking charm. Price on request. (Prisoner 43)

This is replete with advertising motifs, which I come back to below.

Harry wants it and mysteriously but typically Harry gets it (Prisoner
165). It is, as Ron says, ‘an international-standard broom’ (Prisoner 166),
‘the best broom there is’ (Prisoner 167) – so naturally it is unlikely to be
surpassed in a hurry. In Goblet the quality of the Firebolt is confirmed
when it turns out that all the players in the Quidditch World Cup have
one (Goblet 96). But broomstick advertisements still draw Harry effort-
lessly, and while he waits to see the Quidditch World Cup match
an advertisement blackboard catches his eye: ‘The Bluebottle: A Broom for All
the Family – safe, reliable, and with In-built Anti-Burglar Buzzer’ (Goblet 88).
Broomsticks provide the single advertisement-motif that is developed
most systematically through the Harry Potter novels. But there are other
advertisements that are described in detail, notably one for Kwikspell,
A Correspondence Course in Beginner’s Magic, which is given at such
length that it is worth checking out in the book (Chamber 97–8). It uses
the customary advertising ploys of targeting the audience by asking

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questions (‘Feel out of step in the world of modern magic? Find yourself
making excuses not to perform simple spells? Ever been taunted for your
woeful wandwork?’); presenting quality claims through conjoint words
(‘Kwikspell is an all-new, fail-safe, quick-result, easy-learn course’); and giving
customer endorsements with a touch of humour (‘Warlock D.J. Prod of
Didsbury says: ‘My wife used to sneer at my feeble charms but one month into

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your fabulous Kwikspell course I succeeded in turning her into a yak! Thank
you, Kwikspell!’’). A strikingly familiar format for anyone who has seen
an advertisement for a correspondence course in any newspaper or
magazine.
A cursory look at those advertisements (this is merely a small selec-
tion of the advertisement-related motifs that appear in the Harry Potter
books) makes it clear that almost every aspect of modern advertisement
has been covered there. There is a range of linguistic gimmicks typical
of advertisements 4 in there: the calculated misspelling (‘kwik’); the pat
brand name (Nimbus, Comet, Cleansweep, Firebolt); alliterations
(‘simple spells’, ‘woeful wandwork’, ‘magical mess-remover’, ‘unbreakable
braking’); brief declarative statements (‘No Pain, No Stain!’); excessive
adjective usage and conjoined words (‘all-new, fail-safe, quick-result,
easy-learn course’, ‘streamlined, superfine handle’). There are the familiar
advertisement techniques:5 endorsements (Madam Z. Nettles and Warlock
D.J. Prod for Kwikspell); description of product and performance
(especially for the Firebolt); description of accessories (‘In-built Anti-
Burglar Buzzer’); guarantee of performance (‘unbreakable braking
charms’, ‘fail-safe . . . course’); humour (‘I succeeded in turning her into
a yak!’); indication of exclusiveness (‘hand-numbered with its own
registration number’). There is discussion of the effects of product
enhancement (from Nimbus Two Thousand to Nimbus Two Thousand
and One to Firebolt); and there is demonstration of the manner in
which the language and perspectives provided by advertisements enter
everyday usage (see Ron on the Nimbus Two Thousand or Flint on the
Nimbus Two Thousand and One above), and gradually take over modes
of self-appraisal and evaluation and the estimation of others, and set
measures for aspiration and success.
But there is more to Magic world advertisements that just a demon-
stration of what advertisements do. In terms of what they do obviously
Magic world advertisements are no different from advertisements in our
world. Those broomstick advertisements and descriptions cannot but
bring to mind innumerable car and scooter or motorbike advertise-
ments in our world. The Kwikspell correspondence course is similarly
reminiscent of advertisements that we frequently come across in

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newspapers and magazines. Indeed, every advertisement that is men-

tioned in Magic world, every Magic product brand name, closely resem-
bles those that attach to consumer items in our world. The resemblance
is so close that in his essay Pennington felt that these advertisements
merely give evidence of the failure of Harry Potter books as fantasy; these
advertisement motifs merely replicate experiences of our mundane

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world rather than allow any escape into a fantastical world.6 But there is
in fact one immensely significant way in which the experience of
advertising in Magic world is somewhat different from our world, and it
has to do with magic.
In Magic world advertisements never disappoint. The magical claims
made on behalf of certain products are literally magical. Each broom-
stick that Harry gets leads to a greater level of satisfaction than the one
before. Each magical sweet that Harry tastes, each drink he drinks, every
book he acquires give exactly the level of delight and pleasure that the
brand names and advertisements promise. In our world advertisements
often make magical claims: detergents that can make stains simply
vanish, washing liquids that cut through grease in a wondrous fashion,
cars that are unbelievably safe and smooth and soundless and fleet,
food that is unfailingly delicious, shaving lotions and underwear that
act as aphrodisiacs, correspondence courses that give the gift of tongues
in a matter of days, etc. are the stuff of advertising in our world. We
know these are mostly exaggerations, we are prepared for failure and
disappointment, we tone down our expectations according to the con-
dition of our world. But if taken literally, advertisements in our world
gesture towards a world that is not at all unlike Magic world. In our
world advertisements claiming magical properties for products are
exaggerations, in Magic world advertisements making similar magical
claims for products are generally literally trustworthy. Magic world is in
a literal sense the concretization of the magic world of advertising in our
world as a place in-itself; it is no accident that Harry is introduced to it
through the bank and the marketplace.
Another way of looking at that would be to turn Williams’s observa-
tions about the magic system that is advertising inside out: in our world
advertisements are in our terms magical and make extraordinary and
obviously figurative associations; in the Magic world of the Harry Potter
books advertisements are actually simple declarative statements which,
while still seeming magical in our world, are no more than ordinary
statements of fact where everything is literally magical. Insofar, therefore,
as advertisements of the Magic world are directed at readers in our
world, who would recognize them as pretty much the same as our-world

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advertisements but nevertheless no more than literal statements of fact

in a Magic world context, who would be aware of both their familiarity
from an our world perspective and their literality in Magic world, they
have a predictable effect. To readers of our world the advertisements
described in the Harry Potter books are advertisements – but not of the
specific products that they announce in Magic world. They are, in some sense,

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advertisements of advertising itself; they are advertisements that conjure up
and concretize and draw us into the Magic world that is closely associated
with advertising itself in our world. They advertise magic for us. And
naturally, in making the Magic world of advertising come to life, they
draw attention away from an awareness of political economy: it is
pushed into the background, magically made to vanish into marginality
(no one worries about the not particularly serious poverty of the Weasleys
or house-elves).
The Harry Potter phenomenon emanates from amongst those who
receive the advertisement for magic from within the pages of the Harry
Potter books. When Brown in the review that I have quoted above
claims that the Harry Potter books ‘hold the solution to an ancient
marketing mystery’ this is precisely what he is (a tiny bit unthinkingly
but nevertheless obviously) referring to. Brown clarifies that claim later
in the review in the following words:

More than 20 years ago, Jagdish Sheth (1979) pointed out that mar-
keting fads are a mystery, and they are no less mysterious today.
Despite recent attempts to map the fadscape . . . fads remain as inex-
plicably enigmatic as ever. Although I am hesitant to draw lessons
from a single case study, let alone a purported passing fad, the Harry
Potter megafad suggests that the answer to this marketing mystery is
mysteriousness itself. 7

Brown correctly suggests that the mystery (we can call it magic) in the
books is continuous with their mysterious (call it magical) growth into
a fad themselves. Brown is unclear about what he means by ‘mystery’:
he takes it as something that is simply unanalysable. That, it seems to
me, is actually beside the point insofar as the Harry Potter books them-
selves deal with advertising. Insofar as these books do that, they simply
advertise and concretize the magic of advertising itself; the books are
extraordinarily deftly designed to advertise themselves, their magic
world creation, even as they are read.

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19
Movie Magic

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The subtle interplay between our world and Magic world presented
through the depiction of advertisements in the Harry Potter books is
given a further turn by our world renderings of the books on screen.
The advertisements in the Harry Potter books in some sense become
advertisements for advertisement itself in our world (the magic of
advertising); the screen versions of the Harry Potter books are, in a
similar fashion, larger than themselves. They draw attention to the
illusionary qualities of films generally, and the manipulations that
underlie them, in our world. This is so because the phenomenon
arising from the Harry Potter books has been so spectacular that the
film versions could not but be deliberately phenomenal; the filmic rep-
lication of the texts and of the phenomenon arising from them neces-
sarily becomes a process that interrogates the film medium. That the
market conditions which brought about this particular situation also,
almost simultaneously, generated the film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings is noteworthy too. This calculated coincidence
probably indicates the degree to which the Harry Potter phenomenon,
with the implicit social and political effects, has impacted on the field
of filmic reproduction generally. The market manipulators of our
world have arguably abstracted certain magical qualities of the Harry
Potter phenomenon that can be transferred to other media, and turned
it into a producing and consuming frenzy of magic (and fantasy). How
magic may be extrapolated from the Harry Potter books as a matter of
social and political effect is the subject of the next and final chapter of
this study.
The institutional nature of film production and spectatorship has
been discussed widely by film theorists. The planning, production, adver-
tising and distribution of films involve collective and coordinated

141

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142 Re-Reading Harry Potter

processes that bring together various strands of an international

industry. The manner in which spectators are made aware of and
brought to view films, the ways in which they employ certain conven-
tions of interpretation, and the degree to which they finally engage
with particular films are also part of collective and often carefully
coordinated processes. These institutional processes have been exam-

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ined extensively. In the following brief discussion of the Harry Potter
films I mainly address the latter (the matter of spectatorship), with the
understanding that that, to some degree, must reflect the calculations
of the former (the prerogatives of productive processes). My focus on
spectatorship here is consistent with the patterns established for a
text-to-world approach, which emphasizes the prerogatives of reading.
By their very nature the medium of films involve what John Ellis
calls: ‘The predominant myth of cinema, fostered by cinema itself . . .
that its images and sounds represent reality’. 1 Films usually produce
an illusion of reality. They use wholly artificial devices to convey the
impression that what is observed on screen by a spectator is in some
sense really happening. Even if what occurs is fantastic, as in the Harry
Potter films, spectators can engage with and immerse themselves in
depicted events as if they are, so to say, really happening. Ellis also
pertinently observes that every particular illusion of reality is inevit-
ably predetermined by the targeted audience; all films in some sense
anticipate their spectators’ expectations in specific ways, even if the
expected spectatorship is very large:

Cinema habitually proposes a particular enigma to its spectators

through the operation of the narrative image which offers scram-
bled meanings to be sorted out by the film itself. These meanings
are always particular and specific. The spectator is therefore
always specified in her or his turn: a spectator who is curious or
expectant about the particular problem with which the film
promises to concern itself. Such a specification can be highly
defined (as with an anthropological documentary for example), or
it can be of the vaguest kind. With entertainment cinema, it is
usually vague because of the institutional demands of a cinema
that conceives of itself as a mass medium. To get twelve million or
more people to see a film dictates that the narrative image should
produce the most general possible specification of the audience.
However, this general spectator specification still has to be spe-
cific, it still has to provide something that will produce curiosity
or expectancy. 2

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Few would argue with the assertion that the particular specifications
of the projected mass spectatorship for the Harry Potter films has to do
with a desire to see the Magic world of the books brought to life, as it
were – or given a filmic illusion of reality. This desire, happily already
a mass desire before the films were even conceived, was pre-eminently
worth tapping into because of the scale of the Harry Potter phenomenon

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as engendered by the books. Very seldom have films been so preor-
dained to be blockbusters, received so much media attention before
they appeared (pondering how faithful they are likely to be to the
books, to what extent author Rowling intervened in their making,
how well those cast match readers’ expectations), been anticipated
with so much informed readiness. I have given some indicative figures
in this regard in Chapter 3. In this instance the (mass) spectator speci-
fications of the films were predetermined by the books (the phenomenon
of the books). The films were from their inception with reference to
the books rather than independent filmic texts. The precondition of
the making and reception of the Harry Potter films was their ability to
provide a convincing illusion of the reality of the Magic world, and they
were to be tested and judged accordingly. Let’s be clear about this
expectation: no one was seriously going to believe that magic hap-
pened in the films, everyone was going to see whether the films had
succeeded in making the unbelievable believable. This was going to
be, in other words, a test of the skill of film-making, an assessment of
the art of filmic illusion-building itself. Spectators were going to
receive the Harry Potter films to an extraordinary degree not straight-
forwardly as simply a story or simply entertainment (if successful that
would follow, but one has to wait and see whether it is successful
enough to be entertaining) but as films. Those involved in the produc-
tion of the film undoubtedly knew that this would be the case and it
cannot be surprising if their awareness of this expectation happened
to be reflected within the films.
This illusion of reality, within certain limits and within defined
degrees of control, can occur in other media too – in literature and
painting, for instance. I have already discussed Iser’s notion of illusion-
building in the context of reading literary texts in this connection. But
there are arguably different kinds of awareness of illusoriness involved in
the illusory effects of, say, painting and those of film. This is not a mat-
ter of the deliberation with which artifice may be deployed, but of the
technical content of the media in question. The point is made neatly by
Richard Allen in a comparison between trompe l’oeil painting and what
he calls ‘reproductive illusion’ (film) – the specific nuances of these

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terms and the distinction I wish to highlight are clear in the following
quotation:

In a trompe l’oeil painting I see the painting as if it were an object

and not a pictorial representation at all; the trompe l’oeil thus entails
a loss of medium awareness. . . . In a reproductive illusion – so named

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because it is created by forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction
(photography, film, video) – I mistake the fictional referent of a pictor-
ial representation for an actual one. Reproductive illusion may be
considered a form of trompe l’oeil in the sense that it entails a
fictional object taken for a real object; but I wish to emphasize its
difference from the trompe l’oeil illusion as I have defined it. The
difference lies in the fact that the spectator of a reproductive illusion
remains medium aware. In projective illusion I experience a pictorial
or dramatic representation as if it were a fully realized world of
experience and not a representation. Projective illusion is not a form
of trompe l’oeil: The reality is a ‘virtual’ one. Yet, like the trompe
l’oeil, it entails a loss of medium awareness. 3

So, there is always in filmic representation (from this perspective a par-

ticularly potent kind of reproductive projective illusion) a certain degree
of awareness of illusory quality, not in terms of medium awareness but
in terms of the virtual nature of the reality (where the medium seems to
disappear) that is presented. Insofar as the Harry Potter films go, this
allows us to hone our understanding of the precise kind of spectator-
ship specifications that these are constructed to. The audience in this
case, informed and aware of the Harry Potter texts and phenomenon as
it is, looks to assess the success of the virtual reality (as virtual – and
therefore able to accommodate the magical easily – and yet appearing
to be real to the senses) of the illusion, without compromising the
medium invisibility (without having to become aware of how the
medium was used to achieve this). If, for instance, there are special
effects to be seen (as there must be in representations of the magical)
the audience wouldn’t want the fact that these are special effects,
technologically manoeuvred, to be visible on the screen, it would want
them to appear as virtually real – it would like to experience them as
virtually real. But it would know all the time that they are virtual.
The expectation of a convincing virtual reality in the presentation of
Harry Potter Magic world is what the mass spectators naturally expect
(conditional on the determination of the Harry Potter phenomenon),
what the producers know the mass spectators expect, and what therefore

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 Movie Magic 145

they try to produce. To do so, they fall back on filmic techniques of fan-
tastic illusion creation that are tried and tested. These can be elucidated
for the Harry Potter films by using distinctions offered in the classic
work of Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film, in which a section is devoted
to outlining how fantasy is established from/for the cinematic viewpoint.
According to Kracauer this could be done through three techniques:

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one, in a stagey manner (by using bizarre settings, make-up, gestures,
etc.), where the stagey fantasy can either be allocated the same aesthetic
legitimacy as actuality or assigned a lesser validity than physical reality;
two, through cinematic techniques (multiple exposures, superimpositions,
distortions, editing, computer generated special effects, etc.), and again
with at least two alternative levels of relation with physical reality; and
three, in terms of physical reality itself (i.e. not by staged or cinematic
effects but by the defamiliarization of shifting perspectives).4 The first
two of these are particularly relevant to the film versions of the Harry
Potter books. The manner in which these are deployed also reveal
interpretive acts that occur between the texts and the films – especially
(given Kracauer’s sensitivity to the relation between fantasy depiction
and depiction of ‘actuality’) in the negotiations between Muggle and
Magic worlds.
The staged elements in the Harry Potter films provide the most effect-
ive extraneous (in the sense of not deriving directly from the books)
threads of continuity. In the books the description of Muggle and
Magic worlds, and events therein, are primarily held together by devices
of narrative continuity. So, the different described episodes and images –
what Privet Close looks like, what impression the characters of Dursley
and Harry and Hagrid and others make, what happens in Diagon Alley
or Gringotts Bank or Hogwarts, the different magical episodes, the final
confrontations with Voldemort in different guises – are all held
together primarily by the internal logic of the story. This internal logic
can be read in different ways. For instance, as a reader I might choose to
link all the episodes and images together in terms of my understanding
and expectations of the central protagonist Harry, of the manner in
which his character is developed through exposure to other persons
and situations. Or, alternatively, I might choose to link the different
episodes and images in terms of the consistency of the rules that govern
magic, the manner in which these are revealed and elaborated as the
story progresses. These or such strands of internal logic and continuity
have been the raison d’être of my text-to-world reading so far. In the
Harry Potter films the absence of the expository pace of the novels, the
immediacy and abundance of the images (compellingly fantastic) diverts

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attention away from the more leisurely narrative strains of continuity.

In the films therefore the sense of continuity has to be established
through compensatory means, preferably such as are manifested through
the abundance and immediacy of the images themselves. This is primarily
where the stagey effects come in. John Williams’s Harry Potter music
plays a crucial role here. Some suspenseful episodes are linked together

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by the somewhat portentous slow movement of the theme music, which
chimes in the background as Harry is gradually drawn into Magic world
from the Dursley household, and as the mystery of his heritage is grad-
ually revealed thereafter. It comes full blast at times (say when Harry
flies for the first time in the Stone film), and is occasionally played with
quiet pathos (when Hagrid plays it on the flute in the Stone film). Some
wondrous magical moments are connected by the crescendo of the Harry
Potter theme music (as when Harry walks into Diagon Alley for the first
time, or when Harry and friends enter the Hogwarts dining hall for the
first time). Along with the music the visual effect of the Hogwarts envir-
onment provides a sense of continuity that is not wholly due to the
descriptions in the books. The dark (always shadowy) cavernous Gothic
environment of Hogwarts pervades the films and lingers in the spectators’
minds. Fantastic costumes play their role too: those black academic cloaks
that students and teachers are always enveloped in Hogwarts’ classrooms,
the vividly coloured cloaks of Quidditch players. Extraneous staged
effects such as these, more than the internal logic of the narratives, it
seems to me, give coherence to the fantastical audio-visual abundance
of the films. All the magical, fantastical, surreal happenings and effects,
which draw and fill the senses immediately in the films, fall into a whole
primarily because of such staged effects.
Interestingly, the relation of Muggle and Magic worlds is given a more
definite sense of continuity than might be inferred from the books.
I have discussed the implicit continuities between these already in
Chapter 11, but against the unthinking presumption that these reflect
opposed realms of Magic-ness and Muggle-ness, the latter superficially
akin to our world. In the films the sense of continuity is more immedi-
ate, not even unthinkingly mistakable – the Dursleys and Privet Close
are themselves depicted as fantastical in the same way as Magic world,
as belonging to the same carefully staged environment. The characters
in both worlds are presented as possessed of similar sorts of physical
and behavioural quirkiness. A similar sense of vivid colours alternating
with dark shadows (especially in the sweep from Privet Close to the
Dursleys’ tower in the Stone film), a continuity of frenetic action, a simi-
lar audio-visual abundance holds Muggle and Magic worlds together.

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Unsurprisingly, in the films of Stone and Chamber there is no transition

from Muggle world (a bit like our world) to Magic world. It begins with
magic, and from the first scene and onwards Muggle and Magic worlds
are equally drawn into fantastical staginess. In both the books Stone and
Chamber Harry is returned at the end to the Dursleys into Muggle
world; the film versions end at Hogwarts (at the Hogwarts train station

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in Stone, with an aerial view of the school building in Chamber). If Muggle
world is the nearest representation of physical reality in Kracauer’s
sense in the Harry Potter films, it has equal aesthetic validity as the
fantastical Magic world.
The audio-visual abundance of the stagey effects in the Harry Potter
films is consolidated, as it would be expected to be by spectators seeking
a realization of magic in virtual reality, by the use of cinematic tech-
niques. Some are subtle matters of editing. Harry’s point of view is
often, for instance, suggested by the manner in which the direction of
gaze is directed. When Hagrid confronts the Dursleys and Harry for the
first time in the tower in the Stone film, for instance, all the exchanges
are seen from particular points of view: all the characters gaze (through
the camera) down overbearingly on Harry, Harry looks (through the
camera) up at the threatening Dursleys, and both the Dursleys and
Harry look (through the camera) up at the awe-inspiring Hagrid. When
it comes to true evocations of the wondrous, scenes unfold, in time-
honoured fashion, from above – the audience has a belittling eye-view
of, for example, Diagon Alley, Hogwarts’ dining room, the Quidditch
stadium. Ultimately, however, these commonplace editing techniques
for evoking empathy or wonder by determining the direction of gaze
are overshadowed by the feast of special effects that the films naturally,
and to the spectator’s full satisfaction, present.
I hardly need to dwell on the special effects – these are so abundantly
and sensationally used that they do their job perfectly. It is worth
noting though that the use of special effects allow for a kind of visual
imagining that has well-established cinematic conventions but do not
originate directly from the texts. This is where the autonomy of the
filmic medium from the Harry Potter books is most evident, used how-
ever with the effect of enhancing what is implicit in the books while
departing from the strict law of the written word. Thus, for instance, in
Stone the book in the Hogwarts Library Restricted Section that screamed
when Harry opened it (the scream is described at some length in Stone
151–2), is shown as not only screaming in the film version but with
a screaming face that suddenly materializes out of the pages of the book.
The convention of having creepy faces suddenly materializing out of all

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kinds of surfaces is a familiar feature of a large number of horror films

and supernatural thrillers. In a similar vein, the exciting description of
Ron and Harry in the flying Weasley car on their way to Hogwarts after
missing the train in Chamber, becomes in the film version a good place
to put in a whole slew of special effects conventions. The car is shown
dodging under arches, becoming invisible and visible by turns, almost

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crashing into the Hogwarts Express, and getting terrifyingly bashed up
(the whole experience shown from Harry’s and Ron’s point of view
inside the car) by the Whomping Willow. Most predictably, it allows for
a sequence in which Harry falls out of the car and hangs on by the tips
of his fingers in mid-air in typical ‘cliff-hanger’ fashion. Much of these
don’t happen in quite these ways or don’t happen at all in the Chamber
book. But the film still appears to be close to the spirit of the book;
cinematic conventions are used with similar effect in the Harry Potter
films as fiction conventions are used in the Harry Potter books.
As I have observed above, the audience of the Harry Potter films,
informed and aware of the Harry Potter texts and phenomenon as they
are, look to assess the success of the virtual reality of the illusion, with-
out compromising the medium invisibility. And in every way, every
filmic device, whether in terms of staginess or cinematic technique, is
used by the producers to fulfil that particular spectator specification.
The result, in the Harry Potter films, is a meeting of spectator desires and
producer awareness to produce an audio-visual abundance, an assault
on the senses. From the midst of this surfeit there emerges a joint
(producer-spectator) awareness of the filmic medium in general. I have
anticipated this already. This joint awareness is well worth emphasizing
as another element in the Harry Potter phenomenon. It is an awareness
that has to do with a joint apprehension, never harshly exposed but
always there, of the place of cinema in our world. In some sense, in this
joint (or to give it its wider implications, institutional) apprehension
there is a grasp of what films provide and spectators receive: a magical
vision (the virtual reality) based on invisible technology (the medium
itself) possible only because spectacle providers (producers) and spectacle
consumers (spectators) knowingly collude with each other. This happens
to some degree in all films, every would-be blockbuster depends on it.
But the enormity of the Harry Potter phenomenon engendered by the
books lays bare, it seems to me, the bones of this collusion in the filmic
reproductions through the Harry Potter films. The field where this compli-
city of producer and audience is concretized is the virtual reality market.
The enormity of the Harry Potter phenomenon before the films appeared
means that the spectator specifications for the films are more easily

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 Movie Magic 149

determinable, the collusion between producer and consumer more starkly

evident, the conditions of the market more clearly manifest, than is
usual. All that needs to be done, and that is what I have been gesturing
towards above, is to see how it operates in practice in the particular
instance of the Harry Potter films.
Interestingly, it seems to me, that the producers’ awareness of this

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collusion is encoded within the Harry Potter films. The Harry Potter books
allow discussion of the implications of technology vis-à-vis magic (an
issue that several critics have commented on) – I discuss this in the next
and final chapter. As far as the films go, this feature of the books allow
the producers of the films to encode their awareness of precisely what
spectators expect of them within the films. Here’s how the situation
stands. Spectators expect the Harry Potter films to make virtually real the
Magic world that defeats rationalistic and technological enterprise.
Ironically, the means through which this can be done is through the
technologically manipulable medium of the film: largely by the use of
technology-intensive devices (such as computer-generated special effects)
and technology-enhanced staginess. The thematics of the Harry Potter
books therefore impinge with a peculiar irony on the pragmatics of the
Harry Potter films. That this is so appears to be (deliberately?) indicated
in some of the obvious slippages between the narrative of the books and
the films. The most obvious of these are in the beginning and ending of
the Stone book and film. The book Stone begins and ends squarely in
Muggle world, with the Dursleys. The substance of the book is the
apparent inversion of the our-world-like Muggle world (constrained
by mechanical laws) to present a Magic world (rendered free of those
constraints with magical ease). The film Stone however begins and ends
with Magic world. In the first scene of the book we have Mr. Dursley
having some unpleasant experiences. In the first scene of the film
Dumbledore appears in Privet Close, takes out a black sceptre-like
instrument, opens it so that a small industrial claw seems to emerge,
and with it sucks in the light from the street lamps. This could be some
sort of technical instrument, albeit an unusual one. It is very different
from the one described in the book after Mr. Dursley’s day is done: ‘It
seemed to be a silver cigarette lighter. He flicked it open, held it up in
the air and clicked it. The nearest street lamp went out with a pop’
(Stone 12). This too is an instrument of some sort, but it looks like one
that is familiar in our world (and Muggle world) though it serves an
unexpected function (the opposite of the expected in fact). It appears
and is used with a thoughtless ease that the reader may or may not be
struck by. In the film it is an instrument that is clearly mechanical, but

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more sophisticated in appearance than a lighter. It is pretty much the

first thing the spectator is struck by. Immediately after McGonagall per-
forms her favourite transformation from cat to witch (seen in shadow),
and the spectator knows that magic is in the air. This resequencing of
the beginning in the Stone film has the effect of, one, briefly but effec-
tively exorcising the expectations of technology at large (not simple tech-

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nology like a cigarette lighter but sophisticated technology), and two,
plunging the spectator straight into magical happenings. That brief
exorcism of technological expectations could also be read as a gesture to
the spectator to suspend her penchant for looking on the film as a tech-
nologically manipulated medium, to take it on the surface as the virtual
presentation of a magic world.
At the end of the Stone book Harry is returned to the Dursleys for the
holidays, happy in the knowledge that though he was not allowed to
use magic in Muggle world the Dursleys didn’t know that and could be
threatened with the use of magic. The books ends, in other words, with
a reassertion of the Muggle world where magic can only be wish-
fulfilment. In the Stone film it is Hagrid who sees Harry off at the station,
tells him that he could threaten the Dursleys with magic because they
didn’t know that he wasn’t allowed to use it, and gives him a magical
photograph album of his parents (with which Harry could no doubt
find solace even in the company of the Dursleys). In the Stone book
there is an inversion, in the Stone film there isn’t. Right at the beginning
there is brief injunction to overcome technology-oriented expectations
and get absorbed into the audio-visual surfeit of virtual reality – and the
rest, to the happy end, is a straightforward consumer-satisfying display
of movie magic. In the Chamber books that inversion is repeated – it
opens in the grim Dursley household with Harry having a miserable
time, and an authorial voice chimes in and gives the reader all the back-
ground. In the Chamber film the spectator is just plunged in where she
had left off in the Stone film. Here the spectator’s gaze homes in on Harry,
still squarely in Magic world (albeit in Privet Close), looking at that
magical photo album which Hagrid had given him in the previous film.
The Harry Potter books conduct a complex negotiation and renegoti-
ation – repetitive and progressive – between Magic and Muggle and our
worlds. The Harry Potter films simply, straightforwardly, do what the
spectator specifications demand with full medium awareness – the
audio-visual realization of Magic world as virtually real in our world.

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20
The Beginning

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Through most of this text-to-world analysis of the Harry Potter books
I have suggested that there is an underlying theme that connects up
observations about races, servitude, sexual desire, class, advertisements
made above; and that this underlying theme would take me back to the
preoccupation with unthinkingness with which this essay started. It also
leads to a possible explanation of the Harry Potter phenomenon. In this
chapter I attempt finally to place this essay as a whole where it belongs –
in our world. This concluding chapter is the place to make that underlying
theme explicit, and to weave the various threads drawn out in the
above analysis together. I begin this chapter therefore with a straight-
forward statement of that underlying theme.
The creation of the Magic world – i.e. the construction of an institutional
structure for it, the detailing of the environment and people within it,
the focusing on it through the Muggle world, the systematization of
magical processes within it, the invention of a history and mythology
behind it, etc. – is such that it is fundamentally antithetical to our
world. This is so despite its being used (generally unsuccessfully or in an
unsatisfactory manner) to ostensibly reflect and comment on concerns
in our world. Indeed, it is because there is an attempt to use the Magic
world to illuminate certain preoccupations of our world, to strike mark-
edly familiar chords of our world, that its antithetical nature becomes
all the clearer. Briefly, in being constructed around a notion of magic
the Magic world is necessarily, and quite deliberately, presented as
being essentially anti-rational. There are strong limits to the questioning
that is possible and the explanations that are available in the Magic
world. In the Magic world things and qualities are simply manifest –
they just are so – there is no need, no ability, no desire, no will to
explain why they are so. The self-evidently manifest is simply accepted

151

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as the generally unambiguous and unequivocal truth. That is why things

and events are magical in Magic world. It is also therefore essentially
a ritualistic world: spells are learnt and used, their effectiveness and
process is not explained and nor is there any evidence that it can be
explained; the proclivities of sentient beings are predetermined (Volde-
mort is bad, Dumbledore is good, house-elves are slavish, Trolls are stupid,

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a Veela is a femme fatale, Slytherins are Slytherins and Griffindors are
Griffindors), they are not significantly moulded by experience and
education; learning is a matter of constantly acquiring greater and greater
levels of information and memorizing facts, it has little to do with
understanding the principles underlying different ranges of information
and being able to synthesize or collate facts; humans either have magic
or they don’t, they are either Magic or Muggle, and there is no point
questioning why this is so (it might have something to do with blood).
The Magic world is one where questioning cannot be imagined except
to discover facts, to uncover what has happened. Evidently therefore,
our ordinary sense of mystery, and curiosity about the mysterious, does
not exist in Magic world; the only kind of curiosity that can exist (and
one that drives Harry and some of his friends) is one that tries to
uncover a sequence of events that have happened – to uncover the facts
of the past that are relevant for whatever reason. That is no more mysteri-
ous than history is mysterious. The only sense of mystery that can be
brought to the Magic world has to be brought by the readers of the Harry
Potter books of our world: the magical beings and happenings are mysterious
to readers of our world because we are accustomed to trying to explain things,
to understanding principles, to trying to rationalize, and the magical is defini-
tively inexplicable. It is because we are rational and can hope to explain
phenomena and look for deep principles, that we recognize that which
resists explanation and understand its mysteriousness. Understanding
its mysteriousness is also a powerful motive to try to explain it. In our
use of language, in our engagement with the world, in our institutional
structures, in our technological abilities, in every aspect of our present
lives and that of our past the binding thread has been the desire, ability,
will to rationalize. The comfort of faith (along with which comes religious
acceptance, or reconciliation with the miraculous or magical) is constantly
complemented by the desire to understand and explain. The institutional
forms of faith (religions) themselves provide ways of explaining the
apparently inexplicable. And when those explanations refuse to satisfy,
more rational explanations emerge from within faith and defying faith;
so that theology may lead on to philosophy and philosophy to science,
and they can also lead back to or across each other in a variety of different

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 The Beginning 153

ways. Our world is constantly, and both universally and at the same
time pluralistically, predicated on the possibility, desire, ability, will to
rationalize. This is so even when it becomes evident that rationalism is
limited or can be devastatingly wrong-headed. End of catechism.
The Magic world is not predicated on rationality. It is based on the
unquestioning acceptance of what is manifest or can be or comes to

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be manifested; on the acceptance of the way things just magically are.
The Magic world is definitively anti-rational.
Several reviews of the Harry Potter books have tried to understand the
appeal of the Magic world in terms of its relation to the most hard-
headedly rationalistic aspect of our world: the large-scale development
of technology and scientific method. The Harry Potter books do perform
their own putting of magic into perspective in terms of Muggle technol-
ogy. So images of Dumbledore putting out the streetlights of Privet
Close, the Weasleys’ car flying and finally going wild in the Forbidden
Forest, Mr. Weasley obsessively collecting Muggle electric plugs which
have no function in Magic world, the Weasleys struggling with the
telephone, various Muggle-produced objects behaving strangely in the
hands of wizards – these are all images of technology being superseded
by magic. So much so that various technological appliances seem to
obstruct wizards, appear quite unfamiliar and strange in the Magic
world. What Muggles (in this respect like us) can do slowly and labori-
ously by working out scientific principles of mechanics, optics, electricity,
etc. which can then be used to create instruments and equipment to
extend natural human abilities, the wizards are gifted with as natural
magical ability. Wizards, in other words, supersede the need for science
and technology by having at their disposal natural magical abilities that
render scientific investigation and technological innovation unnecessary.
But, why dwell on this relationship between magic and technology?
Some reviewers, Lankshear and Knobel, for instance, feel that this is
done to show that there is something intractable and inconclusive within
technology itself, since magic as presented in the Harry Potter books is
itself a kind of technology:

The books also purvey a philosophy of technology that provides

a timely corrective to the championing of contemporary information
and nano and bio technologies as the defining force of the future.
Daniel Bell’s definition of technology as ways of doing things in a
reproducible manner . . . extends here to casting spells and using
wands. Against the tendency of positivistic scientism to explain all
cause and effect relations in quantifiable and observable terms,

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Rowling promotes mystery and inexplicability within her techno-

logical universe. Moreover, she reminds us constantly that technologies
are never neutral, self-evident, or ‘essentialized.’ What they are
depends on how they are used.1

Unfortunately, Lankshear and Knobel in this instance are simply wrong

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about technology. Technology is not about doing things in a reprodu-
cible fashion but about extending human ability by inventions that
‘involve . . . the use of systematic and scientific knowledge’.2 Magic does
not involve an extension of wizard ability (magic is innate), and it
doesn’t involve systematic and scientific knowledge (it involves going
through certain inexplicable, but effective judging from past experience,
processes of concentration, thought, gesture and enunciation). Technology
needs rationalistic thinking; if the magical ability exists innately it can
be controlled by learning spells, etc. more or less by rote and some
practice. Lankshear and Knobel are mistaken in thinking that technology
is uniquely associated with ‘positivistic scientism’, or that science is
simplistically ‘positivistic’ in some sort of nineteenth-century Comtean
or Machian sense (dealing with ‘cause and effect’ alone and especially
concerned with ‘quantification’). Consequently, the Harry Potter books
cannot be seen as the repository of any ‘philosophy of technology’.
There may be some similarity between the manner in which wizards
use their powers (for both good and bad) and in which humans use
technology (also for good and bad), but I do not see how it follows that:
‘What they [magic, technology] are depends on how they are used’. The
Harry Potter books definitely don’t suggest that magic is itself good or
bad according to usage (it is neutral, as technology may be thought to
be), it is used for good or bad purposes by wizards and witches. Lanks-
hear and Knobel were, clearly, rather confused when they wrote this –
but there is a sensible connection between Harry Potter magic and tech-
nology in our world that they were trying to grasp (and thoughtlessly
missing), and which has been grasped better elsewhere, by O’Har, for
instance. The relationship is one of exclusion: magic and science-
technology are contrary to each other. Both are attempts to understand
the world and do things within it. Magic had been the predominant
way of apprehending the world and trying to get control over it before
science-technology replaced magic by its greater effectiveness and
persuasiveness, especially effectiveness in doing things. But science-
technology wasn’t able to satisfy everyone insofar as understanding the
world goes (probably because science-technology limits itself by its own
rigorous methods) whereas magic was able to do so (mainly by making

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 The Beginning 155

entirely unsubstantiated but attractive and reassuring claims) in the

past. So, even in our world, dominated by the effectiveness and persua-
siveness of science-technology as it is, there is still some longing for the
reassurance and comfort that magic had provided in the past, and this
is where the Magic world and the Harry Potter phenomenon come in.
In O’Har’s words:

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When science and technology replaced magic, what was removed
was that physical-mechanical part of the magical system that simply
could not compete in a new world based on scientific method and
technological efficiency. The part of magic which functioned for the
adherents in the spiritual realm was never replaced. Machines cannot
do the work of gods. Machines cannot calm fears and provide answers
to our deepest fears. . . . The Potter books provide an alternative reality
where magic retains its hold on the world.3

This makes more sense than the former argument about science-
technology and magic. This also hints at an explanation of the Harry
Potter phenomenon, but in an unclear and abstract fashion which is not
placed firmly enough amidst the concerns of our social and political
world. But there are further clarifications to be made before I can state
firmly what I think lies behind the Harry Potter phenomenon.
It is not enough simply to delineate what the distinction between the
magic of the Magic world and the unavoidable rationalism of our world
is. As far as the Harry Potter books play on that distinction there are two
significant inter-linked effects (of significant social and political import)
that need to be laid bare: the deliberate anti-rationalism of the books;
and the idea of chosen people that is simultaneously conveyed in them.
One of the happy circumstances of Harry Potter’s entry into the Magic
world in Stone is that he seems to be famous there already without his
quite knowing why. He enjoys a celebrity status without apparently
having done anything to deserve it. It gradually emerges that his fame
is due to the conviction among wizards that he was responsible for
Voldemort’s fall from power. Voldemort had apparently killed his parents
and cast a spell to kill him too, a mere infant at the time, but unsuccess-
fully. Voldemort’s spell had left a lightning mark on Harry’s forehead but
no other visible effect, and had at the same time rendered Voldemort
himself powerless. It is possible that Voldemort’s failure in this regard
was due to the extraordinary love that Harry’s mother bore him (Stone 216;
Chamber 233); it must have been extraordinary love since the affection
that other victims of Voldemort must have enjoyed hadn’t protected

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them as effectively. At any rate, it is clear that the happy circumstance

of Harry’s celebrity status does confer on him certain advantages. He is
the object of envy and interest among his schoolmates, and has to do
little to make friends and, for that matter, enemies. It gets him a most
interesting and loyal friend in Hagrid from the beginning. All his teachers
are aware of his special status and respond accordingly – Snape with

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malice, and most of the others with indulgence (especially the all-
knowing Dumbledore). Harry is from the beginning a kind of chosen
person in the Magic world, who has acquired fame, friends and enemies,
a peculiarly attractive status and great expectations without having
made any conscious effort to deserve them. No one has any doubts that
his innate abilities would be equal to his reputation – except naturally
Harry himself.
Fortunately for Harry, his innate abilities do turn out to be more
than adequate to his reputation: he is not mistakenly thought of as
a chosen person, he is one. He appears to have a natural ability to fly on
a broomstick, which lands him one of the most enviable roles possible
in Hogwarts: that of a Quidditch Seeker (the youngest ever). Now Quid-
ditch is an odd game4 that, though apparently a team sport, is heavily
dependent on one player alone to decide victory or defeat – the Seeker.
This is how it works. There is something like a football or rugby field
with goalposts on either side, and seven players in each team. There are
three kinds of balls in the game: a Quaffle, Bludgers and a Snitch. From
each team there is a goal keeper, or Keeper. Three players in each team,
called Chasers, try to score goals with the Quaffle; each Quaffle-goal is
worth ten points. The Bludgers constantly try to knock out team mem-
bers, and two members of each team, called Beaters, are devoted to
keeping the Bludgers at bay by hitting them whenever they appear to
threaten anyone. That leaves the Snitch – a fleet, small, golden ball –
that flies around randomly. The Seeker in each team has only one job:
they have to catch the Snitch, which effectively ends the game and
gives the successful Seeker’s team an extra 150 points. Quidditch, in
other words, seems to be designed to give an extraordinarily important
role to the Seeker. The Seeker’s efforts are worth precisely fifteen times
the efforts of the Chasers. So exclusive is the Seeker’s role that it does
not intersect at all with that of the larger part of the team: the Chasers
and Keepers play their own game and cannot influence the Seeker in
any way. Only the Beaters have a role that influences the Seeker, and it
is that of protecting him. It might seem like a team sport, but it is one
in which team-effort has no particular role to play; it is a team sport in
which the rest of the team is below one person, pretty much entirely

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dependent on one person, by the rules of the game. That Harry’s innate
abilities makes him a natural Seeker is about as much confirmation of
being a chosen person in the order of Magic things as could have been
needed. Harry’s natural abilities as a Seeker appear to be true in that in
his first few Quidditch games he overcomes odds that have nothing to
do with the game itself (a hexed broomstick in Stone, a Bludger that

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particularly targets Harry in Chamber) to decide victory. He never loses
through a fair game, and usually wins despite unfair disadvantages. And
it all comes naturally.
In the spirit of complicating matters, in Goblet a Quidditch World
Cup game is described where victory goes to the team the Seeker of
which didn’t catch the Snitch. All that manages to demonstrate though
is how important the Seeker really is: the glory of the moment goes to
the Seeker of the losing team who does get the Snitch, Krum. It also
proves how poor the rest of the losing team is.
The team game that is designed to depend largely on one person is
used to bring out the chosen-ness of Harry. This quality of being chosen
is then magnified, taken to heroic proportions, in the more deadly
games (each involving rules, each involving adversaries, each involving
victory or defeat) that Harry has to play with Voldemort in each of the
novels. Harry keeps winning despite himself. More interestingly, in
these serious life-or-death games Harry wins against rational odds – and
in each of these victory is literally beyond reason (one can’t win by
being rational, rationality plays a role but never a winning role, winning
ultimately depends on being chosen to win or on being the chosen
person). That is where the more explicit anti-rationality of the Harry
Potter books kick in.
Harry Potter’s victories in the life-or-death games are won through
two means: by the shakiness of the rules of the game (these can be broken
or superseded according to convenience at any time), and by the help of
friends who deal with those aspects of the games that can be rationally
dealt with so that Harry can finally win. The rational aspects of the
game are seldom those that Harry deals with himself, and rationality is
always secondary to the final stage where Harry’s natural abilities – his
chosen-ness (in terms of gifts unknown to himself, and courage which
he seems to be born with) – shine through. The endgame of Stone sets
the tone for these contests. Harry, Ron and Hermione go through the
trapdoor to face the man with two faces (one Voldemort’s), and encoun-
ter a series of obstacles. Hermione works out how to get through the
Devil’s Snare plant because she had read about it (she had prepared
herself for it and reasoned her way through a tough situation). Harry

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catches the key to the door by using those innate flying skills that made
him a Seeker. Ron gets Harry and Hermione through the deadly chess-
game at his own expense by working out the moves that would enable
that to happen (he also reasoned his way through a tricky situation).
Hermione solves the riddle that gets Harry into the final stage – Hermi-
one’s reaction on seeing the riddle speaks for itself:

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Hermione let out a great sigh and Harry, amazed, saw that she was
smiling, the very last thing he felt like doing.
‘Brilliant,’ said Hermione. ‘This isn’t magic – it’s logic – a puzzle. A
lot of the greatest wizards haven’t got an ounce of logic, they’d be
stuck in here for ever.’ (Stone 207)

Hermione lets Harry go unprotestingly into the final stage because she
now knows the truth of the Magic world: that Harry is the chosen
person – ‘Harry – you’re a great wizard, you know’ – and that that is
more important than her ‘Books! And cleverness!’ (Stone 208). And
there Harry, with some courage and not a little serendipity, wins against
Voldemort. The pattern carries on in Chamber. Hermione makes the
Polyjuice Potion and solves the problem of what’s in the walls of
Hogwarts, but all that doesn’t matter ultimately. Ron and Harry finally go
to the Chamber of Secrets, Ron is put out of action, Harry faces the past
incarnation of Lord Voldemort alone, and asks for help and magically
gets it from Dumbledore. The sorting hat with a sword and a phoenix
named Fawkes turn up and sort things out for Harry. And the pattern
carries on in Prisoner – reasonable counter-moves getting ever less use-
ful, luck and courage and help from friends (it is Hermione who turns
the clock back at Dumbledore’s suggestion for a happy denouement)
serving Harry as well as before. Then, of course, there’s the Triwizard
Tournament in Goblet. Since this occupies most of that novel, and con-
flates the sporting wizard game with the life-and-death game against
Voldemort, it is worth dwelling on this for a bit.
If Quidditch is a team sport that seems to be designed to depend on
one person, the Triwizard Tournament is a game that appears to thrive
on the breaking of rules that define it – thus defeating all reasonable
moves and counter-moves that are possible since these must depend on
accepting the rules. That Harry finds entry in it at all demonstrates how
central to it – at least insofar as it is conducted in this instance – rule-
breaking would be. Harry’s being chosen by the Goblet of Fire as the
fourth contestant undermines the name of the tournament itself. And

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that Harry finds entry in it at the expense of all the rules that define the
tournament is undoubtedly a clear indication of his chosen-ness: it
would have been clear to all readers that Harry would win, as indeed he
does (though strictly speaking it is a gift from Cedric, but that is only
because Cedric felt – as most readers probably do too – that Harry was
the real winner). There is of course an explanation other than Harry’s

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chosen-ness for his participation: the whole thing is engineered by
Voldemort to lure Harry to the graveyard where Voldemort’s rejuven-
ation was to take place. But that actually merely emphasizes Harry’s
chosen-ness all the more. For Voldemort’s plan to work he must have
been reasonably sure from the beginning that, with only slight assistance
from his spy, the fake Mad-Eyed Moody, Harry would win the tourna-
ment. Besides, at least Voldemort recognizes Harry’s chosen-ness just as
he believes in his own; Harry is to Voldemort himself, who is the Dark
Arts personified, undoubtedly the arch-adversary – the enemy. It is not
Dumbledore, for example. It may also be noted that Voldemort’s
scheme to get hold of Harry appears to be extraordinarily elaborate.
Someone who is capable of placing a spy in Hogwarts, tampering with
the Goblet of Fire and turning an object as secure as the Triwizard Cup
into a Portkey could have chosen a simpler way to achieve the same
end. He could, for instance, have arranged for a potato chip to be
a Portkey. As for the Triwizard Tournament, Harry – like all the other
contestants – freely breaks the rules, and in by now time-honoured
fashion, gets selfless help from his friends on most things that required
some elementary reasoning. For the first task (getting past a dragon)
Hagrid helps him find out in advance what the challenge would be and
Hermione spends a whole night teaching him what to her was a simple
Summoning Charm. For the second task Cedric tells Harry how to
unravel the mystery of the egg and Dobby informs him of the crucial
properties of Gillyweed. For the third task Harry uses all his own gifts,
courage and determination, and some of the things he had been taught
by friends (Mr. Lupin’s instructions on getting rid of Dementors and
Bogarts in Prisoner, Hermione’s confidence in solving riddles in Stone) –
and readers might begin to think that here at last is a victory that is
being more or less fairly won (where the brain wasn’t being entirely left
out, where obstacles were being thoughtfully overcome, where no out-
side help was being offered) when, lo and behold, the rules of the game
change again and the whole thing dissolves into a different and dead-
lier game against Voldemort. This is where Harry’s chosen-ness comes
into its own, and all his attempts at thinking himself (almost rationally)
through the maze become yet another stepping-stone to be left behind.

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The ultimate and, really, only weapon that Harry needs and that works
in Magic world is that Harry is Harry, chosen adversary of Voldemort
from infancy. When the awe-inspiringly powerful Voldemort and the
novice Harry (who could scarcely do elementary spells without Hermi-
one’s instructions) duel with each other incredibly they appear to be
evenly matched.

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The inference seems to me to be inevitable: all the Harry Potter books
centre on the fact that Harry is chosen to be Voldemort’s adversary in
advance and chosen to win; innate abilities account for this victory far
more than any rational ability or anything that Harry can think his way
through and work out; indeed Harry’s chosen-ness is a function of his
innateness; rationality is only useful along the way, but ultimately
doesn’t matter and shouldn’t be taken too seriously; innate abilities are
best exercised in an ignorant and unthinking fashion. Who chooses
Harry? one may ask. It doesn’t matter. There is no answer – whoever
gives magical abilities and innate powers, could be the answer. What
does matter is this: the Harry Potter books are an extended celebration of
unthinking courage and luck; to make this celebration possible an
unthinking hero is placed in a Magic world that is definitively unthink-
ing to be the chosen victor; and all this is largely deliberately presented
at the expense of seeking explanations and using rational principles –
which inevitably, and despite numerous failures and shortcomings,
underlie our engagement with our world.
The anti-rationality and the deeply ingrained centrality of chosen-
ness in the Harry Potter books is the reason why the various apparently
obvious and well-meaning gestures towards our world made therein
either fail or reach unsatisfactory resolutions on closer inspection. The
liberal and well-meaning and anti-fascist veneer in the presentation of
magical races as analogous to human races, and wizard racism to
human racism, is undercut under closer scrutiny by an endorsement of
a deeper form of racism in the Magic world – equivalent to the patroniz-
ing, imperial-mission variety of racism of our world. This deep racism in
the Magic world is not a purely invidious construction; it is a condition
of the manner in which the Magic world is conceived. The inequality of
races is close in spirit to the rule of innate abilities that can’t be
explained and the centrality of chosen-ness that is a priori. Anti-racist
and anti-discriminatory ideologies in our world depend on rational
arguments that are based on a fundamental equality of humans for
social and political purposes. This equality has nothing to do with
innate qualities and natural abilities; this equality devolves from any
sane attempt to employ rational principles with social and political

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 The Beginning 161

effect. It is the anti-rationality and centrality of chosen-ness too that

underlies the peculiarly unsatisfactory account of servitude and slavery
given for the house-elves. Here again, the Harry Potter books appear to
say something relevant about servitude and class-attitudes in our world.
But, in fact, the deeper the reader goes into the presentation of house-
elves the more unconvincing is their species-conditional servitude

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likely to appear. Whatever possible relevance the treatment of servants/
slaves might have had is entirely lost under the conceptual necessity to
accommodate house-elves in the anti-rational magical domain where
innate abilities and chosen-ness reign. Servitude is thus made not a
matter of social injustice but a matter of natural disposition, and in the
presentation of this any equivalence that the house-elves might have
had with situations in our world is lost. Inexplicable innateness, chosen-
ness, magical manifestness also influence the delineation of sexual
desire: what is ambiguously poised in our world between biological
determination and social constructedness, is turned into a simple and
essentialist distillation of biological proclivities. The result (images like
that of the Veela) might have a hint of our-worldness about them, but
almost inevitably fall apart if they are compared closely with sexual
desire in our world. They appear to be reductionist, conventional, trivial
versions of something that looks very remotely like the ambiguous,
ubiquitous, vibrant our-world affair. Since everything significant in the
Harry Potter books is innate, inborn, essential, simply manifest, definitively
inexplicable in terms of rational principles and processes, the wizard
racial traits and house-elf servitude and wizard heterosexual desire have
to be so too. And naturally then they have only tangential, unsatisfactory,
contradictory and, often, ominous implications in our world. But all
this is nevertheless attractive, nevertheless apparently suggestive in our
world, because the possible – the failing – analogues are carefully
deployed, nowhere more effectively than in the use of advertisements
and advertising techniques, or in cinematic renderings. In our world we
are accustomed to being lured by the magic of advertisements; in the
Harry Potter books advertisement magic becomes real and draws us into
what is effectively a massive advertisement for magic, for the magicality
in advertising, itself. The Harry Potter films in our world are pre-
determinedly satisfactory concretizations of agreements that are the raison
d’être of the virtual reality market itself.
The effect of these carefully posed juxtapositions and separations
between the Magic world and our world is that we tend to accept magic
in its own terms, i.e. unthinkingly – with little analysis and a great deal
of acceptance, being light-heartedly lured by the manifest rather than

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being seriously concerned with the not-too-immediately-obvious impli-

cations. It is possible that in the process some of those distinctly unsat-
isfactory, contradictory, even ominous social and political connotations
of the Harry Potter books would unthinkingly convey themselves along
with the superficial and comforting liberal morally correct gestures and
the pleasure of being lured into an unthinking world. Or perhaps it is

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precisely all those qualities – the superficial unthinking qualities as well
as those insidiously underlying them – that actually agree with what
a very large readership in our world (those who have made the Harry
Potter phenomenon a phenomenon) already inclines towards. Perhaps
the current social and political condition of our world is gradually
inclining us away from the rationality that is (often inadequately but
nevertheless inescapably) constituted within it, towards a desire for the
unthinking with some of the implications that follow. Perhaps, in other
words, the Harry Potter phenomenon is such because these books offer
exactly what we unthinkingly desire within our world and because of the
current condition of our world and despite the constitution of our world.
These are desires born in our world; these are not created by the Harry
Potter books, merely realized in them in a certain (attractive, readable,
undemanding) form.
This seems to me to be a plausible explanation of the Harry Potter
phenomenon, but one that will have to be left as a speculative matter
here. Books that engender phenomena such as the Harry Potter
phenomenon, no doubt do so (and I have argued this in Part I) both
because of their intrinsic qualities and content and because of the
contexts in which they are received and, in many ways, constructed. But
to examine this matter further would need a clearer understanding of
the social and political concerns of our world; would need, in other
words, a world-to-text approach to them. For this essay I have decided
to confine myself to a text-to-world analysis, and that, I feel, is done to
a sufficient extent. But as a matter of speculation it is worth indicating
that there has been a prodigious amount of sociological and political-
scientific scholarship on the characteristic features of our world that
may have a bearing on why we may desire the unthinkingly magical
within our world and because of the current condition of our world and
despite the constitution of our world. There is, for instance, evidence
that while our world grows increasingly dependent on science-technology
there is also a growing distrust of science-technology. This is, no doubt,
to a large measure because of the misuse of technology, but also because
of the intense specialization that different areas of science-technology
demand – often such that even scientists and technologists can have

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 The Beginning 163

only a limited apprehension of the field, and intelligent readers who are
not scientists and technologists can hope for little more than a hazy under-
standing of these developments. But nevertheless science-technology in
different ways is constantly and unthinkingly used in our world by
almost all, and is certainly manifest almost everywhere: unthinkingly or
necessarily ignorantly there is something magical about its ubiquity.

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Linked to this is also the growing sense of risks being multiplied in our
world (environmental risks, health risks), of risks being factored into
markets themselves (in terms of insurance assessments and policies, in
terms of technologies designed to reduce risk as well as produce new
risks, etc.). There is growing evidence of inequality across the world,
and a steady increase in internecine and international conflict between
all sorts of social categories – social classes, ideological alignments, ethnic
groups, religious formations, etc. It is quite possible that these conflicts
indicate a renewed and irrational conviction in innate qualities and
chosen-ness. The manner in which national economies have gradually
converged on international capitalism has something to do with all
these factors: technological development, distrust of scientific rationality,
increasing inequalities and conflicts. To a great degree these devolve
from the power mechanisms that world economic organization entail,
and the role of multinational corporations and state organizations
therein. With this emerging world order there has also evolved concen-
trations of power which seem to be unfair and irrational to many, and
which yet have to be accepted and reconciled. An interesting element
within that is the growing preponderance of corporate managerialism
in all sorts of sectors that affect social and political spheres, which is
wilfully and determinedly anti-rational and ritualistic, and often pro-
motes conviction in chosen-ness and innate qualities. And linked to all
the above is the ever-expanding role of the mass media in our world,
affecting more people more closely than anything else. The mass media
both connects people together, informs people about events around
the globe in an unprecedentedly efficient fashion, exposes people to
different social and political and cultural contexts; and at the same time
the mass media also distance these contexts and events from the immedi-
ate reality, conflates them with magical or fantastic images, gives them
a game-like aura. Advertisements are another aspect of the emerging
world order, teeming within both the immediate reality and the mass
media screens and voices – advertisements that play magically with, for
our world, perfectly rational financial calculations.
Put all that together and we have a picture of our world that would be
recognisable in a very wide range of contexts therein. I think if we dwell

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164 Re-Reading Harry Potter

on that picture and what the above-analysis of the Harry Potter books
have clarified there is a meeting between the text-to-world and the
world-to-text approaches that are possible. It is quite possible that the
Harry Potter phenomenon grows unthinkingly but surely out of that
meeting. More and more people in more and more contexts unthink-
ingly read the Harry Potter books, absorb their film versions and the

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advertisement images and computer and video games and other
consumer products that derive from them, because they are inclined by
our world to do so. The question is: are the Harry Potter books really read
in the sense that some people speak of ‘reading a face’ or ‘reading
a situation’ – read, that is, as being thinkingly understood?

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 Part III
World-to-Text

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21
Reading Re-Reading Harry Potter

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Continuing with the text-to-world argument

Readers of the first edition of this book (written in 2002) complained

that I had represented the Harry Potter books as entertaining too black-
and-white a view. I was fortunate in having responsive readers: not just
reviewers and researchers, colleagues, students and friends, but also
persons I don’t know felt compelled to write to me. Some of these
respondents took issue with my allegedly paying insufficient attention
to the ambiguities of the Harry Potter books, particularly apropos the
representation of class, race, gender and sexuality, and the politics of
values (fascist ‘evil’ and liberal ‘good’). It was averred, for instance, that
my argument about the transposition of race relations on the Muggle–
Magic relationship and the signification of ‘blood’ failed to take note of
the constant interjections of hybridity. In other words, I hadn’t noted
that Harry and Voldemort being of mixed Muggle/Magic heritage, and
Hermione being purely Muggle-born, etc., constantly undermine any
over-signification of ‘blood’ and counter the fascist politics of Voldemort.
Similarly, it was pointed out that my argument about characterising
a class of servants – the house-elves – as a biogenetically determined
species didn’t account for the manner in which power relations are
ambiguously distributed between the house-elves and wizards. Even with
the first appearance of Dobby in Chamber of Secrets, it was clear that
house-elves have at times as, if not more, powerful magic at their dis-
posal; and later, in Deathly Hallows, Dobby’s power overcomes Voldemort
and the Death Eaters. Moreover, the house-elves are shown as con-
stantly undermining their masters, as much in Dobby’s betrayal of the
Malfoys as in Kreacher’s betrayal of Sirius. At one point Dumbledore

167

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suggests that the house-elves are not born into servitude but are subju-
gated by the social order of wizards:

‘Kreacher is what he has been made by wizards, Harry,’ said

Dumbledore. ‘Yes, he is to be pitied. His existence has been as miser-
able as your friend Dobby’s. He was forced to do Sirius’s bidding,

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because Sirius was the last of the family to which he was enslaved,
but he felt no true loyalty to him.’
(Order of the Phoenix, pp. 733–4)

None of the respondents took issue with my observations on gender

and sexuality, but in a general way most objected that I should have
taken account of ambiguities in the representation of norms in the
books (broadly, fascist ‘evil’ and liberal ‘good’). Almost all the key char-
acters in the series, I was told, constantly test the reader’s assessments:
Defence Against Dark Arts teachers often straddle normative bounda-
ries; it is not clear till the end whether Snape is ‘good’ or ‘bad’; at times
it seems that even Harry’s father, James, and Dumbledore have lapsed
into normatively questionable positions; and it is clear that Harry and
Voldemort do have something of each other in them.
These points are all, of course, well taken, but as far as I can see they
do not contradict anything I wrote in 2002. I had clearly signalled that
hybridity introduces complexity into the argument about race relations
(see first edition, pp. 104–5 and 108–9). My argument was that if
Muggle–Magic relations are mapped on to race relations in our world (as
they are, because some of the recognisable markers of racial discourse in
multicultural contexts are deliberately pinned on this relationship)
something worrying happens. Muggle–Magic relations are relations of
innate inequality (certainly innate, even though the transmission of
magical powers by bloodlines is questionable) and therefore opposition
to them is a matter of virtue on the part of liberal wizards. By contrast,
in our world racial prejudice is opposed both on the clear understand-
ing of the natural equality of all humans and by rejecting the social
construction of race itself. In short, in our world this is not a matter of
virtue, but of reason. Similarly, insofar as I had outlined the representa-
tion of a class as a species, I had also clearly marked out the subversive
potentialities that Dobby’s role at that stage obviously presented (see
pp. 113–14). In fact, my argument followed from that: since Dobby
(and later Kreacher) is inevitably aware of the injustice of his condition
as a rational being, it seems strange that his condition should be pre-
sented as somehow innate rather than socially imposed. I had presented

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both these arguments – and similar arguments about gender and sexual-
ity, and about normative distinctions generally in the books – as being
conceptual contradictions in the way the Harry Potter world is con-
structed. I had also suggested that these contradictions mirror something
of the contradictions that operate generally about these issues in our
world, even among the well-meaning liberal constituency.

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The respondents whose views are summarised above often drew on
material from the last three books – Order of the Phoenix (2003), Half-
Blood Prince (2005) and Deathly Hallows (2007)1 – to take issue with me,
even though these hadn’t been available when I was writing in 2002.
Some felt that my argument may well have applied to the first four
books (though most were annoyed that they were made even with
regard to these), but by the end of the series enough complexity has
been introduced for me to reconsider them. It is interesting that almost
all the respondents, whether irate or earnestly seeking my reconsidera-
tion, expressed an underlying desire to keep the Harry Potter books free
from any taint. This desire is itself worth exploring, and I will do so
intermittently in this and the coming chapters. But first, to keep the
record clear: I don’t think that the completed series – the full Harry Potter
text, so to speak – has in any way necessitated a reconsideration of my
original argument made in 2002. On the contrary, the final three books
have not only complied with the thrust of that argument, but rendered
it more relevant, in a deeper fashion.
I do not mean to extend the argument made in 2002 by dwelling
again on the categories of class, race, gender and sexuality in relation to
the final three books of the series. Those categories have been examined
elsewhere with reference to the Harry Potter books, and will no doubt
continue to be, and have often reached similar conclusions.2 Instead, I
shall focus on outlining how the general thrust of my earlier argument
chimes in with key strategies of the later books – strategies, that is,
which enable the resolution and closure of the Harry Potter text. The
general argument I made in 2002 was that the Harry Potter books place a
consistent premium on what can be thought of as ‘innateness’. Innate-
ness works at various levels in the Harry Potter text: magic powers are
innate (people are either born with them or not); social attributes are
turned into biogenetic characteristics (as for the house-elves); hetero-
sexual desire and gendered identity are innate qualities (encapsulated in
the Veela, for instance); Harry’s strengths – his ability to fly, his courage,
loyalty, etc. – are qualities he is born with rather than acquires. I had
observed that this premium on innateness is complemented by a down-
playing of rational ability and by Harry being given things without

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working for them. Thus Harry is protected by his mother’s extraordinary

love, he inherits wealth, he is famous before he knows why, he is
simply given efficient broomsticks, the Invisibility Cloak and the
Marauder’s Map, he enjoys headmaster Dumbledore’s favouritism and
protection, he is marked out by an optimistic prophecy. Hermione’s
considerable intellectual abilities, which save Harry repeatedly from the

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first to the last books, are predetermined to play second fiddle to
Harry’s innate qualities and advantages. In the later part of the text, as
Voldemort’s past is unravelled in Half-Blood Prince, we find the pattern
of innate proclivities being repeated but with reverse effect. Voldemort
is innately evil from childhood. Even in their first encounter, Dumbledore
had observed in him ‘obvious instincts for cruelty, secrecy and domina-
tion’ (Half-Blood Prince, p. 259; my emphasis). Harry’s and Voldemort’s
instincts determine what they become – otherwise both were orphans
brought up in a hostile environment and socialised through adversity
before they arrived at Hogwarts. The premium on innateness is critiqued
superficially through Voldemort, only to be perpetuated tacitly by the
very structure and conception of the Harry Potter text. That was the
thrust of my argument in 2002, and it continues to apply to the series
as a whole. In fact, it applies more firmly because the final three books
deepen further the reliance on innateness and give it a religious turn.
There are primarily two magical devices around which the resolution
of the Harry Potter series is constructed: the dark magic of Horcruxes,
and the power of love. Horcruxes are explained to Tom Riddle (the
youthful Voldemort) by his teacher Slughorn as follows:

‘. . . A Horcrux is the word used for an object in which a person has

concealed part of their soul.’ . . . ‘Well, you split your soul, you see,’ said
Slughorn, ‘and hide part of it in an object outside the body. Then,
even if one’s body is attacked and destroyed, one cannot die, for part
of the soul remains earthbound and undamaged.’ . . . ‘Well,’ said
Slughorn uncomfortably, ‘you must understand that the soul is sup-
posed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation, it
is against nature.’ . . . ‘[You do it] By an act of evil – the supreme act of
evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard
intent on creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage:
he would encase the torn portion –’
(Half-Blood Prince, pp. 464–5)

It appears thereafter that Voldemort has managed to make seven

Horcruxes of his soul, so the business of killing him would involve first

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destroying these. Horcruxes are things, as well as an animal (Nagini),

and even a person – Harry Potter himself, who dies and comes back to
life purified to defeat Voldemort in the final book. Slughorn’s explana-
tion makes it clear that the creation of Horcruxes is, first, predicated on
‘the supreme act of evil . . . murder’, and, second, consists in the split-
ting of the soul, which is itself ‘an act of violation . . . against nature’. In

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other words, the process of forming Horcruxes – of externalising and
splitting the soul – is innately evil: the process itself is evil, irrespective
of causes and results. The strongest normative disapproval is imbued in
Slughorn’s description.
As it happens, the idea of a process of externalising and splitting the
soul has a considerable basis in folklore around the world. James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough (1922), for instance, outlines folktales and folk rituals
and customs from widely dispersed contexts, touching every continent,
which are about external souls being stored in things, plants and
animals, and which often conceive of the soul as split and stored simul-
taneously in multiple receptacles.3 These myths and rituals all have a
functional air, with underlying notions of maintaining souls in safety
or enhancing life and power, and in some cases maintaining the conso-
nance of social and natural order. Normative notions of good and evil
are not conceived as innate to externalising or splitting the soul in any
of these folktales and ritual practices, except, as Frazer notes, under
certain circumstances:

If a man has more vital places than one in his body, why, the savage
may think, should he not have more vital places than one outside
it? Why, since he can put his life outside himself, should he not
transfer one portion of it to one animal and another to another?
The divisibility of life, or, to put it otherwise, the plurality of souls, is
an idea suggested by many familiar facts, and has commended itself
to philosophers like Plato, as well as to savages. It is only when the
notion of a soul, from being a quasi-scientific hypothesis, becomes a
theological dogma that its unity and indivisibility are insisted upon
as essential. The savage, unshackled by dogma, is free to explain the
facets of life by the assumption of as many souls as he thinks
necessary.4

By characterising the process of forming Horcruxes – externalising

and splitting the soul – itself as implicitly evil, the Harry Potter text
makes its first, directly compromising gesture towards dogmatic Judeo-
Christian religiosity. Those Christian dogmatists who had been

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172 Re-Reading Harry Potter

campaigning to ban the Harry Potter books in the early 2000s must have
been pleased.
Onwards: in the last book, Deathly Hallows, when Harry is temporar-
ily killed by Voldemort and meets Dumbledore in a kind of afterlife
King’s Cross station, the latter gives Harry (and the reader) a final expla-
nation for Voldemort’s ongoing failures against Harry and imminent

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final defeat. The key reason, in Dumbledore’s words, is this:

‘That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to com-

prehend. Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty and
innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing.
That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the
reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.’ . . . ‘A part of his
soul was still attached to yours, and, thinking to strengthen himself,
he took a part of your mother’s sacrifice into himself. If he could
only have understood the precise and terrible power of that sacrifice,
he would not, perhaps, have dared to touch your blood . . . but then,
if he had been able to understand, he could not be Lord Voldemort,
and might never have murdered at all.’ . . . ‘My dear boy, its [Harry’s
wand’s] remarkable effects were directed only at Voldemort, who
had tampered so ill-advisedly with the deepest laws of magic. Only
toward him was the wand abnormally powerful.’
(Deathly Hallows, pp. 568–70)

One may quibble with the details of this explanation, by asking: why
is Harry’s mother’s love more powerful than that of Voldemort’s other
victims, who also presumably have those who love them? Is every kind
of love equally powerful – Bellatrix Lestrange’s love for and loyalty to
Voldemort, for instance? Of more interest here, however, is the charac-
terisation of the ‘deep’ structures of magic. It appears that just as the
making of Horcruxes is in itself evil, at the deepest level, magic itself
(‘the deepest laws of magic’) is inclined towards good and is predicated
on the power of ‘love, loyalty, innocence’ (‘a power beyond the reach
of any magic’; ‘the terrible power of that sacrifice’), and controls its
instruments (wands) to work against anyone who disturbs that basis in
good. In other words, magic can be used superficially for good or evil,
but it is ultimately good that must prevail through magic because that
is the basis for magic itself. There is innate goodness at the bottom of
magic itself, manifested through but beyond human agency, inten-
tions and causes. This characterisation of magic as good in its ‘deepest
laws’ also bears a strong resemblance to what Frazer might have called

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‘theological dogma’, specifically, to Christian agapj. The concept of an

abstract selfless and all-embracing Christian love (agapj) – which in a
sense is beyond human capacity and is understood as God’s love,
which characterises God’s creations and which humans can aspire to –
as differentiated from selfish physical love eros, has been much dis-
cussed, particularly since Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros (1953).5 It is

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that sort of abstract power that seems fundamental to magic. Harry,
who has distinctly messianic qualities (including a penchant for resur-
rection and an ability to overcome evil), turns out to be the instrument
of these deep good laws of magic. Christian dogmatists who wanted
the books banned should be very pleased with the ending of the
series.6
What I am leading up to is that the two key devices which bring about
the resolution of the Harry Potter series in the final books – Horcruxes
and the power of love – deepen the concept of innateness around
which the earlier books had already been structured. Unlike the earlier
books, however, these devices have a religious ring to them. In the last
two books, magic is no longer a neutral fantasy technology which can
be wielded for good or bad ends by persons with good or bad inten-
tions. Some critics have mistakenly thought that Harry Potter magic is
analogous to science or technology as we understand it.7 Actually,
magic seems to be a quality embedded in the fantasy world at large, the
various processes of which have normative content (good or bad), and
the very constitution of which has a deep normative content (ulti-
mately good). This characterisation of magic also robs the protagonists
of agency. Voldemort is not really self-determining: as Dumbledore
observes, he is innately such that he cannot comprehend this truth
about the magic world; if he could, he would be otherwise. Nor is Harry
self-determining. Rather, he is innately in tune with the deep qualities
of the magic world and cannot but succeed. In a way, both are unthink-
ing manifestations of the innate qualities and normative content of
magic itself rather than free agents who pit their wits against each other
and aspire to mould the world. Unless the reader has a deep-seated reli-
gious conviction in the goodness of our world, few fantasies can appear
to be more debilitatingly anti-human (not just anti-intellectual) than
the fantasy world (Magic and Muggle in a mutually defined bind) of the
Harry Potter series. The success of the first four Harry Potter books, which
I had put down to a pervasive ethos that is receptive to unthinking
notions of innateness, may well have been consolidated by the later
two books because the current ethos is even more receptive to unthink-
ing innateness in its dogmatically religious forms.

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174 Re-Reading Harry Potter

Switching to a world-to-text view

Thus far in the first edition chapters (written 2002) and so far in this
chapter (written 2008), I have stayed with the text-to-world argument –
that is, re-reading the Harry Potter text and working out what associations
from our world are called on to make sense of it. The idea is that any

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reading of the text necessarily, whether thinkingly or unthinkingly,
calls on such associations in our-world terms to be able to make sense of
the text, and my re-reading is an attempt to make that explicit. In
undertaking this re-reading, some of the structural and conceptual fis-
sures within the text, and their ideological connotations, are noted. I
have not attempted so far that other approach which I briefly mooted
earlier, the world-to-text approach. I described this as a method for clari-
fying the social and political implications of the Harry Potter phenome-
non by ‘delineat[ing] them from the midst of an informed understanding
of processes of globalization, financial and market discourses, religious
and other ideologies, specific cultural formations and cross-cultural per-
spectives (with the underlying linguistic and political presumptions),
and the linkages between these’ (p. 21). To be honest, I did not attempt
it because I felt not only ill equipped to engage the range of informa-
tion needed, but also because the world-to-text methodology itself was
not then as clear to me as the text-to-world one. Now, however, I think
I have a better conceptual grasp of the world-to-text methodology, and,
though still ill equipped in the vast range of relevant information,
would like to conduct a limited engagement with it. The remainder of
this and the following three chapters are an attempt at a world-to-text
approach to the Harry Potter phenomenon.
Becoming clear about the world-to-text methodology involved disa-
busing myself of two tacit – unthinking really – assumptions in my own
argument so far. First, it occurred to me that my earlier analysis was
based on a rather loose characterisation of our world, the contexts of
which are not sufficiently marked. Consequently, it has the appearance
of addressing a universally recognisable understanding of our world.
While there are features in that characterisation which are in fact widely
dispersed and recognised (globalised corporate activity and exploitation
of markets, for example), there are also mixed among them features
which are context-specific and conditional to my own location (the
assumption that class/race/gender would be perceived in a particular
fashion or would be perceived at all as significant issues). A world-
to-text approach would require a considerably more contextually nuanced
understanding of the Harry Potter phenomenon, without losing sight of

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 Reading Re-Reading Harry Potter 175

the common ground shared by different contexts in our time. Second,

the text-to-world methodology naturally assumes the primacy of the
original Harry Potter text – the series penned and signed by Rowling and
published in English by Bloomsbury. The idea was to look at those
definitive original editions closely as the source from which, in a more
or less linear manner, the Harry Potter phenomenon was generated, and

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to explain the latter accordingly. For the world-to-text approach, how-
ever, a quite different sense of the Harry Potter text is needed: the ‘text’
in the text-to-world methodology is not the same as the ‘text’ in the
world-to-text methodology; the definitive original English editions are
not returned as primary foci in the latter. What is needed here is a far
more complex understanding of the Harry Potter text that is joined to
the Harry Potter phenomenon; for the world-to-text approach we need,
in fact, a grasp of Harry Potter as a ‘fluid text’.
In a world-to-text perspective, the more widely the Harry Potter phe-
nomenon is received and accommodated the more fluid the Harry Potter
text becomes. I have used the singular ‘Harry Potter text’ so far because
the seven English books in the series appear now as a single continuous
text with a beginning and an end. From the world-to-text perspective
there is a larger dimension to this singular designation: if one thinks of
the global dispersal of the Harry Potter phenomenon as surrounding a
sprawling, expanding ‘fluid text’, in John Bryant’s sense (I haven’t for-
gotten to quote, just momentarily deferred quotation to let the suggestive
phrase speak for itself), then the seven original books are but a small
part of this text and not a particularly stable part at that. The enormous
marketing success which is denoted by the ‘Harry Potter phenomenon’,
and which materialises in a constantly swelling fluidity of Harry Potter
textualisation, has increasingly only a perfunctory relationship to the
Rowling-authored text. The Harry Potter fluid text constantly diminishes
and undermines the original English books, the authority of the singular
author Rowling, the publishers’ (Bloomsbury/Scholastic) hold on the
original editions. The fluid Harry Potter text bubbles out and beyond
them, surrounds them and engulfs them, and relocates them and modi-
fies their reception, despite the shrillness with which intellectual property
claims and controlling authority are asserted on behalf of the author
and the originals. (Some details of this will crop up in later chapters.)
Bryant’s formulation of the ‘fluid text’ actually attaches to all literary
texts and is a condition of textuality itself:

The textual condition – encompassing processes of creation, editing,

printing, and adaptation – is fundamentally fluid not because specific

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176 Re-Reading Harry Potter

words lend themselves to different meanings or that different minds

will interpret the words fixed on the page in different ways, but because
writers, editors, publishers, translators, digesters, and adapters change
those words materially. Moreover, these material revisions can attest
not simply to localized fine tunings but to new conceptualizations of
the entire work. Thus, a literary work invariably evolves, by the col-

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laborative forces of individuals and the culture, from one version to
another. If we want to know the textual condition, we must get to
the versions of a text, and there we will also find an even deeper
condition of creativity within a culture.8

Bryant’s ‘fluid text’ stretches both before and after what is usually
received as a definitive edition, and has as much to do with the proc-
esses through which texts are made as with the processes through
which texts are received and receptively reconstructed. By emphasising
the processive nature of both production and reception, Bryant dilutes
the presumption of textual unity, of the stability of originals and defin-
itive editions, which we usually take for granted. This has an immediate
bearing on the work of textual editing. But that’s not my thing here:
Bryant’s account of the fluid text also flows into receptive processes.
When Rowling’s seven books appeared in the market as definitive editions
of the Harry Potter text they entered an extraordinarily widely dispersed
receptive field. They were translated into more than 60 languages
and sold worldwide; they were produced as audio-books; they were
adapted into films for worldwide distribution; they generated an enor-
mous number of fan-sites and fan fiction (stories authored by fans for
fans, using the Harry Potter characters and fictional worlds as scaffolding);
Harry Potter computer games were produced; a vast range of Harry Potter-
branded merchandise (picture books, postcards, posters, playing cards,
cups, t-shirts, etc.) was churned out; textbooks and curricula at various
levels excavated the books; an immense amount of mass media and aca-
demic writing was devoted to them – all these are part of the Harry Potter
fluid text. The seven English editions are but flickering points in the
Harry Potter fluid text, constantly modified by its expanding fluidity and
constantly relocated within the contours of fluidity, but also constantly
there as points of return and reference within the fluidity. Reading this
Harry Potter fluid text is at the self-same moment a process of accounting
for how different contexts and ideologies and socio-economic agencies
worldwide act upon and are acted upon by that fluid text. That, effec-
tively, is the world-to-text approach that the remainder of this book
moves towards.

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 Reading Re-Reading Harry Potter 177

Staying with the self-reflexive note that I have already struck, one of
the obvious receptive areas where the fluid Harry Potter text finds itself
flowing into and out of is the academy. This has to do with education at
the school and university levels, and the manner in which Harry Potter
has been instrumentalised in this has received considerable attention.9 I
won’t pursue this here. This has also to do with research and scholarship,

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which usually appear from the university and research institute levels of
the academy. But much more important than the academic spaces within
which research and scholarship are produced is the academic discourse
through which they are formed and in which they are made available.
In a way, the academy appears in research and scholarship less explicitly
as an institutional space of production and work, and more obviously
as an institutional discourse. This discourse is usually instantly recognisa-
ble in academic texts: through a combination of carefully delineated
methodologies and arguments, usually a depersonalised tone, using a
specialist disciplinary register, following conventions of citations and
references and allusions, registering awareness of a field of discussion
within which an academic text should be placed, etc.10 Underlying
academic discourse are practices and agreements that gesture towards
the institutional space of the academy – the manner in which economic
and cultural capital are distributed there, the rituals that identify
academic community, the relationship the academy has with states and
corporations11 – so that, arguably, academic discourse and the academy
as institution can be seen as inextricable expressions of each other. Both
the academy as institutional space and the nuances of academic discourse
have been extensively studied, separately and in relation to each other,
but it is worth putting it into perspective here. This is partly because, by
doing so, I have marked one of the world-to-text grounds in terms of
which the fluid Harry Potter text and phenomenon can be placed, but
also because this book itself was first written in 2002, and expanded in
2008, as within that academic discourse. And academic discourse is par-
ticularly worth dwelling on here because it has an anxious relationship
with the Harry Potter text and an anxiety-ridden place in the Harry Potter
phenomenon.
This anxious relationship seems to me to be manifested at various
levels. Many of those responses mentioned above to the argument I made
in 2002 were actually expressions of disgruntlement about my bringing
the Harry Potter text within this discourse. It was tacitly suggested that
to do so was not only to take the Harry Potter text outside its ‘natural’
sphere of children and fans, but also to take academic attention outside
its ‘natural’ sphere of ‘serious’ writing. Reviews approached it either to

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178 Re-Reading Harry Potter

discern whether there wasn’t a fan ‘dream[ing] of the Hogwarts Express

arriving to take [the author] to join Harry at school’12 behind this effort,
or to cast it as a work that is ‘curiously pedantic’ and directs a ‘beady
gaze’ on the ‘sinister side’ of Harry Potter.13 Various e-forums accused
me of ‘missing the point’, being ‘pointless’, ‘stupid’, ‘pompous’, ‘heavy’,
‘convoluted’ or ‘simply wrong’, and advised me to ‘get a life’. Since

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none of these remarks derived from an engagement with the arguments
made, it seems likely that these were expressions of resistance to my
addressing the Harry Potter text within an academic discourse at all. In a
different tenor, the growth of scholarly writings around Harry Potter
has itself been marked by a tacit anxiety. As scholarly efforts took off,
those that did not immediately place the Harry Potter books as ‘children’s
literature’ or ‘fantasy literature’ often spent time justifying the need for
academic attention (as if academic attention needs to be justified for
anything) or carefully positioning its academic claim. The very title of
Lana Whited’s edited The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter (2002)14 is a self-
deprecating self-positioning statement; in the edited collection Reading
Harry Potter, Giselle Anatol devotes a section (‘Why Engage in This
Project?’) to explaining why Harry Potter is ‘critically significant and
should be taken seriously’,15 as I did in the first edition of this book
(pp. 14–23); Cynthia Hallett’s edited Scholarly Studies in Harry Potter
(2005) – also a carefully self-conscious title – came with several papers
which agonise over the problem of bringing Harry Potter within academia,
notably Laura Shearer’s16 about teaching the text in higher education
and Evelyn Perry’s wondering why Harry Potter is suffering from ‘schol-
arly neglect’.17 Such self-consciousness in scholarly approaches to Harry
Potter has much to do with the unthinking resistance to academic dis-
course, especially in relation to the sacred text of a large fan-base, which
I mentioned above. Those who did perceive Harry Potter as worthy of
academic attention as ‘children’s literature’ (which obviously seems safer)
had a somewhat different and larger-than-Harry Potter anxiety to deal
with: the place of ‘children’s literature’ itself within an elitist academic
discipline of literary studies, coming as it does from practitioner roots,
was still being consolidated (an issue I have examined elsewhere).18
And, chiming in with all that, there is a representational gap between
the kind of knowledge institution described in the original Harry Potter
text and academia as we understand it, which scholarship can only
engage with by taking a text-to-world approach or by understanding
Harry Potter as a fluid text in a world-to-text approach.
What needs to be understood is that there is no university, no institu-
tional space for higher education or research, in the magic world of

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 Reading Re-Reading Harry Potter 179

Harry Potter. All the teaching and learning, and, more importantly,
thinking and conceptualising and understanding the universe that is
necessary in the magic world is confined to the secondary school of
Hogwarts – essentially a pedagogic institution catering to young persons
between the ages of 11 and 17. The appellation for those who profess
specialist knowledge in universities in our world – professors – is trans-

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posed to school teachers at Hogwarts. These are teachers who are not
necessarily specialists in the sense we normally understand: the qualifi-
cations and evidence of specialism for being a Defence Against the Dark
Arts professor, for instance, seem to be very loosely defined indeed.
Research and scholarship are not institutional or disciplinary activities in
the magic world. In Philosopher’s Stone readers gather that Dumbledore
had done something like research when working with the alchemist
Nicholas Flamel and had discovered the twelve uses of dragon’s blood
(Philosopher’s Stone, p. 77). But there is no indication that there was any
institutional or professional setting for this. The sort of research and
discovery that are possible in the magic world can be accomplished by
students in Hogwarts, as the extracurricular notes and spells in Snape’s
old potions textbook in Half-Blood Prince demonstrate. Unsurprisingly,
when a researcher from our world engages in scholarship of the Harry
Potter text she discerns not just a recognisable practice of school-level
education, but also a comprehensive absence of the institutional pursuit
of scholarship. And, appropriately, the engagement with Harry Potter
in research and scholarship needs to come to grips with this lacuna.
From a text-to-world approach this presents another slippage within
suggested equivalences between the world (Magic-Muggle) represented
in the Harry Potter text and our world (like those I charted in 2002) – in
this instance, the slippage between the knowledge system that applies
to Hogwarts school and the knowledge system that we understand and
institutionalise in academia (in and beyond school).
Academic curiosity about this slippage in Harry Potter is well evidenced,
and reveals as much about the nature of scholarship in our world as about
the Harry Potter text. Some researchers have taken the Muggle world and
our own to be uncomplicatedly identical and assumed a catholic attitude
towards the Hogwarts curriculum and the magic knowledge system.
Torbj ó rn Knutsen’s view – inspired by ethnographic work on magic by
Hubert and Mauss19 – is a reasonably representative one in this regard:

wizard and muggle scholars rely on different ontological assumptions.

Both of them agree that a Real World exists. However, muggle scien-
tists define this Real World more narrowly than wizards. For whereas

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180 Re-Reading Harry Potter

wizards acknowledge the existence of beings and objects that exist in

both the muggle world and the wizarding world, muggle scientists
acknowledge the noumena in the muggle world alone.20

Unfortunately, this is misleading. First, it suggests that there is a

Muggle science represented as a knowledge system in the Harry Potter

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text. There isn’t – there are some wizards (Mr Weasley obviously) who
may be interested in Muggle technological devices, but only in incom-
prehension, as a sort of magic itself. It therefore mixes up Muggle world
and science in our world, and talks of the nonexistent science in Muggle
world (a fictional construct to complement magic world) as if it is the
same as science in our world. Second, it thereby suggests that wizards
are aware of our world science as a knowledge system as well as a dis-
crete magic knowledge system that we are unaware of. Acknowledging
‘the existence of beings and objects’ in Muggle world is not at all the
same as understanding science in our world – or, for that matter in
Muggle world, if indeed there is science there. The wizards’ dependence
on magic comprehensively excludes the possibility of understanding
science in any meaningful sense. Third, by citing Hubert and Mauss,
Knutsen seeks to garner some kind of authority for the view that magic
is objectively there with regard to a Real World. Mauss was considerably
more circumspect: his view of magic was as a social accrual, of ‘the
expectations of successive generations, their tenacious illusions, their
hopes in the form of magical formulas. Basically it is nothing more than
this . . . ’.21 Closer to the mark are two essays in Neil Mulholland’s The
Psychology of Harry Potter (2006). Robin Rosenberg’s, entitled ‘What Do
Students Learn From Hogwarts Classes?’22, answers that question by
observing that magic world lacks curiosity and therefore understanding
of scientific enquiry and methods; basically, the school teaches memo-
rising and learning by rote and practice rather than by problem-solving
and creativity. That explains, in Rosenberg’s view, the kind of helpless-
ness that prevails in magic world and makes it vulnerable to Voldemort’s
machinations. It is fortuitous that Muggle-educated kids like Hermione
and Harry are around to save the world. Charles and Emma Kalish, in
their essay ‘Hogwarts Academy’, reach substantially the same conclusions
after a closer look at the Harry Potter text, and conclude that ‘Hogwarts
is a kind of trade school’ in our world terms.23 Within their text-to-world
limitations there is nothing wrong with the latter arguments, as they
represent clearly an academic penchant for homing in on the misrecog-
nition of academic work and knowledge systems in the Harry Potter text.
Understandably, engagement with the world-to-text approach to
Harry Potter has generated more interest in scholarly circles. This has

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included coming to grips with the manner in which the marketing and
publicity of Harry Potter have developed, media attention and corporate
activity were generated, pedagogic interest was cultivated, adaptations
and rewritings in different media appeared, reception in different con-
texts and through translation was conducted, and so on. In such schol-
arship, the Harry Potter text in its English editions has gradually ceased

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to have a definitive role and has instead become a node in the fluid text
of Harry Potter readings and re-readings, translations, adaptations,
rewritings and allusive textualisations. In an essay indicatively entitled
‘Is There a Text in This Advertising Campaign?’ (2005), Philip Nel strug-
gles with both the marketing success that is known as the Harry Potter
phenomenon and the scholarly criticism that interprets that phenome-
non as symptomatic of a corporate capitalist ethos, to complain that
these divert attention away from the perception that ‘The Harry Potter
novels represent the creative synthesis of a lifetime of reading, and to
evaluate their literary qualities, we might consider how Rowling uses all
that she has read’.24 Nel then tries to correct this disregard by seeking
out the texts behind the text. But this was already a somewhat passé
exercise in valorising authorial ownership (Rowling’s) and reviving con-
fidence in the definitive novels’ ‘literary quality’, perhaps undertaken to
remind us all that Nel had written J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels
(2001)25 along those lines. Meanwhile the world-to-text approach has
gathered a far more dynamic pace in relation to the Harry Potter fluid
text and phenomenon.
There are two directions in this world-to-text approach, each already
opened to some extent in existing scholarship, which are taken up in
the following three chapters: these concern the fluid text of Harry Potter
in different linguistic/cultural contexts, and that fluid text in other
forms. The next two chapters are devoted to the first of these: examin-
ing how the Harry Potter fluid text has been negotiated and reproduced
in two specific linguistic/cultural contexts – namely, in Bulgaria and
China. The English Harry Potter text offers the most fleshed-out ‘foreign’
(that is, outside Britain) link with regard to Bulgaria and Bulgarians. How
the fluid Harry Potter text has circulated in Bulgaria and among Bulgarians
is addressed in the next chapter. Arguably the thinnest trace of ‘foreign’
allusions – allusions so remote and slight that they serve more to erase
than establish a link – in the English Harry Potter text is with regard to
China. What happens to the fluid Harry Potter text in China occupies
the chapter after that. Something analogous to this kind of approach has
been undertaken from a broadly sociological perspective. In Nexon and
Neumann’s edited Harry Potter and International Relations (2006) there
are two papers relevant to this approach. Jackson and Mandaville’s

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182 Re-Reading Harry Potter

‘Glocal Hero’ argues that rather than regarding the Harry Potter phe-
nomenon as global, in the sense of presenting homogeneous features
worldwide, it should be understood as ‘glocalization’: ‘worldwide distri-
bution is sustained and enhanced by a process of localization whereby a
cult product from one context is translated into different local contexts’.26
Having placed the phenomenon within a familiar sociological register

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of globalisation studies, the authors then anchor it to the levels of trans-
lation that operate in localisation. The latter is undertaken, however,
with so wide, and therefore so bitty, a range of information that it is
impossible to arrive at a coherent sense of the nuances of localisation.
Somewhat more successfully, in ‘Foreign Yet Familiar’, Towns and Rumelili
discuss the reception of Harry Potter in terms of an over-schematic inter-
national politics model, focusing on Sweden as a context where Harry
Potter represents the British, and Turkey as one where it represents the
West.27 The dominance of the sociology/international relations register
in both papers, however, means that the Harry Potter text is lost entirely –
even as a fluid one. Harry Potter becomes a somewhat incidental grid in
which observations about and categories relevant to contemporary global
and national societies can be framed.
Interestingly, the notion of ‘glocalisation’ and in relation to Harry
Potter too appears also in an empirical study of the impact of media in
children’s fantasies, Media and the Make-Belief World of Children (2005).
This outlines the fascinating case of ten-year-old Israeli Udi, who has
created a complex fantasy life which brings together his reading of the
Harry Potter novels with other media influences and local circum-
stances.28 The authors categorise this as an instance of ‘glocalization’ too.
The last chapter here turns to fan fiction, thus picking up an example
of the fluid Harry Potter text’s different forms. A substantial amount of
scholarly attention has been devoted to the many media and forms to,
through and out of which the fluid Harry Potter text extends from a
world-to-text perspective, particularly with regard to the films and com-
puter games,29 which I don’t address here. Fan fiction has inspired some
of the most interesting interrogations of textualisation, reading and
worldly negotiation with regard to Harry Potter specifically and literature
and criticism generally. This has already attracted scholarly attention –
something I examine in the last chapter.

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22
The Bulgarian Connection in
Harry Potter

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by Milena Katsarska

The Bulgarian connection

The Bulgarian connection in the Harry Potter text and phenomenon can
be positioned between a brief explanation of the phrase ‘the Bulgarian
connection’ and a quotation from EU Commissioner Guenter Verheugen’s
comments in January 2002. He had reportedly observed that ‘Bulgaria
would need magical powers, “a Harry Potter approach”, in order to finish
the accession talks by the end of 2003’. Extending the reference a month
later at the Barcelona summit, the then Prime Minister of Bulgaria,
Simeon Saxe-Coburg, was told how to do his ‘homework’ in order to
strengthen Bulgaria’s chances for early accession.1 This may strike us as
one of the least likely contexts in which a reference to Harry Potter would
appear, and could be read simply as a rhetorical way of saying that
Bulgaria’s chances of accession in the near future were regarded as very
slim at the time. My subsequent discussion shows, however, how the
Commissioner’s remark frames the particularities of the Harry Potter
phenomenon in relation to its Bulgarian ‘reading’ or, more appropriately,
‘reimaging’, ‘remapping’ and ‘rebranding’.
The Harry Potter phenomenon ‘happened’ in Bulgaria on a signific-
ant scale between 2000 and 2007 with the appearance of the author-
ised Bulgarian translations of the Harry Potter books, published by
Egmont2 Bulgaria EAD. The film adaptations are a part of the phenome-
non in Bulgaria: these started to appear in February 2002 after an initial
delay, which was followed by intensive exposure as the phenomenon
caught on worldwide and Bulgaria set about catching up. Both accelera-
tion and ‘catching up’ have a bearing here (I return to this below). As in
other contexts, the success of the Harry Potter series and films was phe-
nomenal, and their popularity cut across generations. In the context of

183

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184 Re-Reading Harry Potter

a book market where the standard print circulation is 1,000 copies and
‘each product which sells more than 3,000 copies is considered a hit’,3
Egmont Bulgaria EAD Executive Director Georgi Alexandrov’s announce-
ment, after the seventh book came out, that the Harry Potter books had
a total print circulation of 355,000 copies speaks for itself.4
The title phrase here, ‘the Bulgarian connection’, is inspired by Alek

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Popov’s essay in the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency (BTA) edition 100%
Harry Potter in December 2003.5 This short essay, by a noted Bulgarian
author born in 1966,6 presents a superlatively enthusiastic endorse-
ment of J. K. Rowling’s decision to include Bulgarians in Goblet of Fire
as Quidditch World Cup finalists (Bulgarian translation published in
2002) because, ‘like every great work of literature, Harry Potter creates a
parallel reality’. For Popov, this reality was shared by ‘hundreds of
millions’ across the globe and referred to the football World Cup Finals
in 1994, when ‘Bulgaria was triumphant in stadiums, buzzed incessantly
in the global flow of information, and Bulgarian footballers became media
stars led by the famous Stoichkov. In practice, this was the most success-
ful and the largest in scope PR campaign in the country’s history over
the last few decades’.7 For his audience of Harry Potter fans Popov unpacks
the ‘authenticity of this collective image’ of the Bulgarian Quidditch
team: comparing Viktor Krum to Stoichkov; noting that the players’
bellicose assertiveness before the referee, Mostafa, was reminiscent of the
1994 football World Cup Final; drawing attention to those typical rep-
resentatives of Bulgarian folklore, the Veela, ‘the most beautiful women
Harry had ever seen’ (Goblet of Fire, p. 93); recognising the realistic
depiction of the typical Bulgarian bureaucrat, though in magic world he
speaks English (Goblet of Fire, p. 104). For Popov, the fantasy Harry Potter
Quidditch World Cup Final shows, as the real 1994 football World Cup
Final had shown, that ‘our team is a worthy rival to be taken seriously’,
and he revels in his conviction that ‘the virtual champion Viktor Krum
has already been generating a sense of national identity together with
the real idols of the nation, such as Stoichkov and other geniuses’.8
Popov’s essay highlights the motifs which gained momentum in the
relation between Bulgaria and the Harry Potter phenomenon. Bulgarians
focused on the tangible presence of compatriots in the fictional Harry
Potter world (Viktor Krum, the Quidditch team members and the minis-
ter), that is, on that which literally constitutes a ‘Bulgarian trace’ in
Harry Potter. The primary concern was ‘tracing’ the fictional trace into
the real world of Bulgaria.
The reasons underlying this strategy have something to do with the
quotations at the beginning, and are suggested in the title of Popov’s

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 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 185

essay itself ‘Bulgarskata sleda v Hari Potar’. He employed the phrase ‘bul-
garskata sleda’, which corresponds to and has currency as ‘the Bulgarian
connection’ in the English-speaking world, and alludes to the Cold War
era. More specifically, it recalls the attempted assassination of Pope John
Paul II in 1981 when a Bulgarian, Sergei Antonov, was implicated but
eventually found not guilty.9 This was widely covered in the press in

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what was then ‘Western Europe’ on the other side of the Iron Curtain,10
and has since been considered a major blot on ‘the image of Bulgaria
abroad’ and a difficult episode to deal with in the process of positively
reimagining Bulgaria after 1989. The need for such a positive reimag-
ining of Bulgaria within Bulgaria was necessitated after 1989 by dramatic
socio-political and economic changes, accompanied by financial, gov-
ernmental and demographic crises, which led to significant cultural trans-
formations and crises of values and identity in the transitional 1990s.11
After 2001, in the second phase of transition12 in a climate of relative
stability and economic growth, this renegotiation of ‘Bulgarianness’ within
continued. But now, additionally, engaging the process of EU accession
negotiations meant that the terms in which ‘Bulgarianness’ is conceived
outside had to be considered too. The Harry Potter text and phenomenon
appeared in Bulgaria at precisely this crucial juncture, and naturally
Harry Potter came to be positioned between a post-communist legacy
(past) and a (present) transitional period and an aspiration (future) to
become an EU member state. ‘The Bulgarian connection’ in Harry Potter,
therefore, went outside and beyond the actual ‘Bulgarian trace’ in the
Harry Potter books and films. It started flickering between the slipping
and fluctuating boundaries of past, present and future, and between the
‘real’ and ‘fantasy’ worlds of Harry Potter, and beyond that into the com-
plexities of the ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ of Bulgaria itself – ‘what Bulgaria
fantasises about’, which might be provoked by trauma or shaped by
aspiration. ‘The Bulgarian connection’ accordingly became a matter of
national identity reconstruction and performance, which was dispersed
across several discursive axes: the very conception of identity (from
essentialist and fixed to constructed and fluid); the socio-political trans-
formation within Bulgaria (from national communism to capitalist
liberal democracy); Bulgaria’s location in a transitioning region, the
Balkans; Bulgaria’s location within Europe and as aspiring to EU mem-
bership.
Thus the discussion of ‘the Bulgarian connection’ and Harry Potter in
this chapter expands on the arguments outlined above by working on
three interrelated and intersecting planes. First, the Bulgarian reception
and framing of the Harry Potter phenomenon in popular discourse as it

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186 Re-Reading Harry Potter

has taken shape up to 2007 in mass media (newspapers, magazines,

television), electronic forums and publicity campaigns will be drawn
on. Second, critical (academic) discourse which the phenomenon has
generated in Bulgaria will be examined with reference to one published
book, a number of scholarly papers and an unpublished PhD thesis.
Third, the two aforementioned discourses will appear to varying degrees

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as related to and even part of the fluid text of the Harry Potter phenome-
non (books, films and marketing). These three planes are entwined in
the following detailing of ‘the Bulgarian connection’ which is outlined
above.

Viktor Krum – Stanislav Yanevski – Boris Mitkov

Viktor Krum or the importance of publicity

The Bulgarian ‘trace’ in the Harry Potter series became available to English
readers in 2000 with the appearance of Goblet of Fire, but without
attracting significant interest at the time.13 Two years on, it was mostly
through Egmont Bulgaria’s publicity campaign that interest in the
fourth book to be published in Bulgarian was considerably heightened,
and the publishers were able to announce an initial print-run of 35,000.
The press release articulated the Bulgarian connection in a way that
went beyond the character of Viktor Krum:

The anticipation of this book is higher because of the presence of

Bulgaria in the novel – the Bulgarian team plays at the Quidditch
World Cup Finals and one of the main characters is Viktor Krum. The
author herself shares, ‘I find the folklore of South East Europe exceptionally
unique and different from the British-Irish traditions. I chose Bulgaria
as a finalist in the Quidditch World Cup, after I had been touched by its
folklore and history.’14
(emphasis added)

It doesn’t matter whether the phrasing or sentiments attributed to

J. K. Rowling are accurate. This initial press release was a way of con-
structing the Bulgarian connection in Harry Potter within a publicity
initiative, anticipating that this could be an effective trope in the recep-
tion of the text and using its resonance with the tried-and-tested terms
for constructing Bulgarianness, through history and folklore, as ‘excep-
tionally unique’. This first articulation of the Bulgarian connection also
had the advantage of fitting a worldwide phenomenon into the ongoing
process of the country’s attempts to renegotiate national identity and

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 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 187

rebrand Bulgaria for internal and external consumption. Unsurprisingly,

between 2001 and 2003, a British Council-sponsored project, indicatively
titled ‘Branding Bulgaria’,15 was undertaken, which brought together
leading Bulgarian academics, journalists and intellectuals to work out
ways of representing Bulgaria in a positive light. One of its recommen-
dations was to capitalise on the fourth Harry Potter book’s representation

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of Bulgarians and, by implication, Bulgaria.16
Two years down the line, while the Bulgarian edition of Goblet of Fire
was still being vociferously discussed by readers like Popov, it was the
process of organising its film adaptation that led to the new wave of
public attention:

This is, without doubt, God’s intervention on behalf of a small coun-

try, which has experienced hard times in being recognized by the
world and which has been conducting occasionally agonised negoti-
ations with Brussels with regard to its accession to the European Union
(envisaged for 2007). One of the characters in Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire, the fourth work in the world-famous saga about the
young wizard, turned out to be of Bulgarian origin!17

This is the emotive opening paragraph to a 2004 article, ‘Harry Potter

Ignites Passions in Bulgaria’, in the Bulgarian language edition of the
France-based newspaper Parizhki vesti (Paris News), written by a Bulgarian
émigré of Popov’s generation. The article, among a number of others,18
was in response to Director General, Bulgarian State Agency for Tourism,
I. Gyurov’s announcements of a strategy for boosting the country’s tourist
industry made several months earlier. Between March and May 2004,
Gyurov had been quoted as having identified that ‘somewhat moody
young man of few words’, Viktor Krum, as the ‘symbol of New Bulgaria’.19
He discerned ‘a unique opportunity [to have] millions of children and
their parents globally [become aware of] one of Bulgaria’s greatest rul-
ers, Khan Krum – who has given his name to the Quidditch team player
Viktor Krum’.20 Gyurov hoped that having read the book, and after see-
ing the film, ‘millions of kids will ask their parents to visit the country
of the fearless seeker imagined by J. K. Rowling’.21 Since the casting
negotiations for the film adaptation of Goblet of Fire were underway,
Gyurov expressed the hope that a Bulgarian boy would play the part, as
that would ‘open doors to tell the world about Khan Krum’s glorious
times, when the political map knew only about two great states in Europe –
Bulgaria and the Empire of [the] Franks’. Heated e-forum debates fol-
lowed, featuring both sceptical voices (‘Do we really need a fictional

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hero to represent our country? Is that our only national pride?’) and
more optimistic, ‘realistic’ ones (‘Let’s be realists – can our museums, our
nature and our hotels really attract kids and parents from all over the
world?’). The casting of Viktor Krum was set to become a complex nego-
tiation of contending ideologies and national allegiances.

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Stanislav Yanevski or the importance of embodying nationality
Already enjoying a considerable following of young and adult admirers,
as fan e-forums22 indicated, the character of Viktor Krum ignited a new
wave of passions as the news that a ‘real Bulgarian boy’ would be sought
for the film adaptation was revealed. E-forum discussions became more
animated: younger users were excited by the prospect, shared their dis-
appointment or ‘anger at the little word space Viktor Krum has in the
book’, felt anxious that ‘the film might cut this even shorter’ or ‘exclude
the love scenes with Hermione’, and resolved to ‘look down upon
Warner Bros., if they change their mind’ and cast a ‘non-Bulgarian’. ‘If
the producers do not choose a Bulgarian for the part of Viktor Krum
but some Brit kid, we’ll find him and shoot him’, one forum participant
stated.23 The turnout for the casting event in Sofia on 4 and 5 February
2004 was consistent with the enthusiasm expressed in the forums.
Depending on the media source, between 2000 and 4000 young persons,
aged between 15 and 19, came for the auditions from all over the country,
some by truanting, others arriving in organised buses from the Vidin
English Language High School, for example. The two most assertive
refrains were, first, a Bulgarian casting agency24 should make the selec-
tion, and do it in Bulgaria; and second, the boy must be Bulgarian.
Consequently, the announcement that Stanislav Yanevski had been cast
in London was met with some disgruntlement. Responses to it were
contradictory and heated too, as the greater number of forums’ partici-
pants wondered, ‘Is Stanislav Yanevski Bulgarian enough?’ given that he
was not a resident of Bulgaria. Most of these entries resonated with the
nationalistic discourse of the 1990s, the so-called ‘brain drain period’
which witnessed the two largest emigration waves from Bulgaria and
was constructed as a national disaster and tragedy. Ten years later, while
initial forum responses still expressed an ingrained isomorphism between
nationality and territory, the actor was gradually recognised as a Bulgarian.
In fact, he came to be seen as ‘embodying nationality’ by virtue of being
born in Bulgaria, and was described thereafter as a ‘typical’ Bulgarian:
‘swarthy, with thick eyebrows, and aquiline nose; tall, round shouldered;
strong and sturdy’; ‘our boy’ and a ‘true Balkan type’.

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 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 189

Get ready because . . . looking at the movie screen, your face will inter-
changeably express fear, hope, laughter, anxiety and . . . (not) a little
pride, when you hear how a multitude of thousands of wizards chants
the name of Viktor Krum.25

This is what the publicity discourse emphasised, while different voices

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in the forums chimed in. ‘Our Stan is number one. He is Bulgarian all
right. . . . Stan is the most handsome Viktor Krum. He is the most hand-
some of all in Harry Potter’, observed ‘Mimi’ and ‘Dani’, while a ‘Fan’
opined:

I am very glad that finally the image of Bulgarians will be connected

with such a handsome and intelligent boy. It is really an honour to
us to have such young, promising people, whose roots will never be
severed. They will remain forever closely linked with what consti-
tutes Bulgarianness, with our rich history and widely recognised
intelligence. Way to go to Stanislav!26

Since November 2005, when Mike Newell and Stanislav Yanevski

appeared in all Bulgarian media for the Sofia premiere, Krum, Yanevski
and ‘Bulgarian’ have blended seamlessly.

Boris Mitkov or the importance of lineage and kinship

At this point one might justifiably ask: ‘What if the textual “trace” of
Bulgaria did not exist in Harry Potter – would there still be a Bulgarian
connection in the text?’ The answer is yes. In 2002, prior to the transla-
tion of Goblet of Fire into Bulgarian and the unravelling of the Bulgarian
‘trace’ in Bulgaria, a Bulgarian ‘blood-relation’ has already been mapped
on the ‘family tree’ of the Harry Potter phenomenon – in the film adap-
tation of the first book. This was when the publisher Egmont offered as
the chronologically first entry of the ‘Most Curious Facts about Harry
Potter’ thread27 the following, under the heading ‘Boris Mitkov – the
Bulgarian kid who takes part in the Warner Bros. production Harry Potter
and the Philosopher’s Stone’:

Bobby is 11 years old – exactly the age of the little wizard in Harry
Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Bobby’s birthday, just like Harry’s, is
in July. The Bulgarian boy has been growing up in London too, even
though he was born elsewhere – in Sofia in 1990. Just like Harry, the
charming Bobby is also an offspring of a notable family tree – his

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great-great-grand father is the famous Bulgarian writer Geo Milev,28

whose daughter, Leda Mileva,29 is Boris’s great grandmother.30

Two immediate inferences can be made from this succinct account, one
of a number about Boris published at the time.31 First, by virtue of gen-
eration, sign, place of residence and a ‘significant’ lineage, Boris Mitkov

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is so much like Harry Potter that he could be regarded as Harry himself.
Second, by virtue of origin, family and birthplace, he is Bulgarian. Hence,
syllogistically, Harry Potter is Bulgarian – a claim which was very nearly,
if not quite, made. It was certainly implied.
A complex series of negotiations can be discerned here. On the one
hand, the construction of Boris’s Bulgarianness as related to birthplace,
origin, genealogy and history traces a line through his ancestors: a great-
great-grandfather who is ensconced in the Bulgarian literary canon and
a grandmother who represents the contemporary cultural elite in the
country, both associated with the political left and a recent communist
past. This emphasis on heritage suggests an understanding of national
identity in ethnic historical terms. On the other hand, in order to con-
struct Bobby’s ‘Potterness’, the significance attached to such arbitrary facts
as his generation, zodiac sign and place of domicile and development is
emphasised. The latter are not seen as diluting his ‘Bulgarianness’ but
accentuating it, since all these can be recruited to the idea of the ‘new
Bulgarian’ – born and growing up in the post-1989 period and geo-
graphically mobile. The underlying rhetoric here is that of setting a
claim for legitimate acceptance and inclusion on equal terms in which
Harry Potter is signified as the world, or at the very least Europe. The pas-
sage quoted above goes on to report that Bobby was thrilled at being
chosen to be one of the kids in Gryffindor House in the film, it was his
‘greatest wish’, which resonated with Bulgaria’s aspiration to become
a member of the ‘EU club’ at the time.

Viktor Krum – Dracula – the Other

Alongside popular enthusiasm, the Harry Potter phenomenon did not

fail to attract significant academic and critical attention in Bulgaria, but
without addressing explicitly the Bulgarian reception of Harry Potter. The
academic discourse mostly revolved around textual analysis of the books
and the role of film adaptations,32 especially in relation to children’s
literature, teenage creativity and educational issues,33 and some of the
global responses which it generated, such as censorship.34 Even though, as
befits academic discourse, these critical writings are far less emotionally

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 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 191

charged and more analytical, they often address issues similar to those
outlined above, issues of identity and representation and their underly-
ing ideologies and power relations,35 and the relationship between real
and fantasy worlds.36 Here I present a survey of some of these discus-
sions with a view to showing how ‘the Bulgarian connection’ has figured
in critical terms, and how therein a sense of researchers’ identities is

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conveyed.
Names and naming patterns in the Harry Potter series generated a
number of popular accounts and academic publications. It is hard to
say what impression the Bulgarian names made on English readers.
Judging from two sample website entries in the ‘glossary’ of Harry Potter
names, we can assume that ‘Viktor’ evoked the obvious association and
‘Krum’ was a grey area:

Krum, Viktor Bulgarian seeker and Durmstrang triwizard champion.

Close ::cough:: friend to Hermy-own-ninny . . .
‘Viktor’ is phonetically the same as ‘victor’, and he defeated Lynch
in terms of catching the snitch. According to A Harry Potter Fansite,
‘Krumm’ is a German adjective used in phrases such as ‘dont slouch’
and ‘sit up straight’, and literally means ‘crooked’ or ‘bent’.37

And:

Viktor Krum: His first name means the ‘victorious one,’ appropriate
for a forceful Quidditch player.38

Every Bulgarian aged seven (when school education begins in Bulgaria)

and above, however, unmistakably identifies the surname with the his-
torical Khan Krum (r. 803–14). During his reign the Bulgarian territory
expanded twice, law and order were installed (the first known Bulgarian
legal code was introduced) and enemies of long-standing were defeated
(the Byzantines under Nikephoros I). In Bulgaria the name is immedi-
ately and universally recognised as indelibly associated with heroic
national history – hence the ‘added value’ to the image of Viktor Krum,
which would revive national pride, realise aspirations for new law and
order, both recall past glory and quell ‘enemies’ (sceptics), and symbolise
the elevation of the new Bulgaria in the world.
Scholars who recognised the importance of Viktor Krum as ‘the
primary symbol of Bulgaria’39 and analysed the character40 in terms of
literary (and cultural) representation naturally made the connection to
the historical Khan Krum. The scholarly account of this connection,

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however, was framed quite differently within the discourse of postcolonial

criticism:

Khan Krum was one of the most famous Bulgarian rulers who reigned
during the IX c. and who defeated the army of the Emperor Niquephor
and made a goblet out of his head with which he proposed a toast

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for the Bulgarian warriors. He was victorious and thus the association
with the origin of the Bulgarian Quidditch player’s first name Viktor.
The name he has been given implies also the possibility of a noble
origin. It also presupposes what Viktor will be competing for – he
will be trying to win the goblet – a symbol of his victory. The histori-
cal fact is considered rather repelling and savage-like by westerners
and to those familiar with this possible connection of the name of the
Bulgarian star it would bring the association of the savage capable of
cruelties and inflicting death.41

Thus in 2003 Cheshmedzhieva addressed the issue of how the name of

Harry Potter’s opponent in the TriWizard Competition can also be
interpreted as the implied ‘wickedness and difference of the Other’.42
And, further on:

The name of the Quidditch star adds to the perception of the Bulgarian
player as an outsider who has taken the quest to compete with the
British centre. However, he is not one of the centre, and this bodes
the end of his quest for the goblet. The implication of victory that
his name brings serves only the purpose to strengthen the contrast
between him and the hero of the centre and makes the victory of the
centre ever so important.43

In the same vein, the textual appearance of the character as well as the
appearance of the actor Stanislav Yanevski who embodies him – ‘thin,
dark and sallow-skinned, with a large curved nose and thick black
eyebrows . . . like an overgrown bird of prey’ (Goblet of Fire, p. 95) –
immediately seemed to suggest demonic, Dracula-like features. This per-
ception is, it was argued, exacerbated by the almost ‘inhuman’ Veela,
who moreover gender the peripheral image of Bulgaria44 within the
Balkans45 and represent a threat to the stable English centre through,
for example, their power over men. This argument then extended to the
entire repertoire of Bulgarians in Goblet of Fire:

The names of the Bulgarian team and the other characters in the
book, invented or picked up from books and directories, definitely

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 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 193

sound difficult and weird to the British centre. They also give us a feel
for the territories that Bulgaria covers in Rowling’s understanding.
Following the etymology of the names used, Bulgaria in its imagined
form could be defined as covering the territories from Hungary to
Russia.46

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This critical account of the Bulgarian connection in Harry Potter used
examples of names, descriptions of characters’ appearances and person-
alities, plot developments, etc. and made numerous evocative associa-
tions, which mapped along the axes of periphery and centre, marginality
and dominance.
One more illustration will serve to clarify this further. Viktor Krum’s
school, Durmstrang, is identified as ‘mobile’ and Bulgarian scholars have
noted an association with Russia in it: by virtue of its northern location
and landscape; the apparel of its members (fur capes and uniforms); and
the Ivan Grozni or Koschei Bessmertnyi47 look-alike headmaster, Igor
Karkaroff, who sees double-dealing everywhere. As Cheshmedzhieva
points out, ‘these interchanging associations with Russians and Bulgarians
are suggestive of the understanding and presentation of Bulgaria as a
satellite of the ex-Soviet Union’.48 Concurrently, there is a parallel asso-
ciation with the Balkans (e.g. Krum looks like Dracula), and the name of
the school is easily linked with the German movement Sturm und Drang
(‘Storm and Stress’), which in turn ‘perfectly matches . . . the image of
the Balkans as a site of chaos and political turbulence’.49 Consequently,
the presentation of the school revives, as Bulgarian scholars pointed out,
western stereotypical constructions of both the East during the Cold War,
and of a racial Balkan ‘other’ in a nineteenth-century mould. Thus, it was
maintained, Goblet of Fire can be placed within a strand of English liter-
ature from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and G. B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man50 to
Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale51 and Julian Barnes’s The Porcupine.52
The scholarly mapping of this fuzzy ‘imaginative geography’ (Said),53
as it applies to Bulgaria, interestingly also turned in on itself to impli-
cate the location from which the critical gaze was extended. Within the
above arguments an assertive stance can be discerned, deriving from and
embracing a real geopolitical location and sense of identity on behalf of
the researchers making those arguments. The manner in which geopo-
litical location and cultural identity was exercised by the critical voice
enunciating these arguments played in complicated ways with the manner
in which these critical voices incorporated at the selfsame moment their
academic status and authority (for instance, with reference to postcolo-
nial theory).

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The discernment of the researcher’s identity being tacitly exercised

through a critical text is not a straightforward matter, and has to do with
recognising the critical choices that are made. Some Bulgarian Harry Potter
critics have, for instance, been particularly interested in the connotations
of colours:

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The colours of the two teams are of no less significance and carry
obvious associations: the Irish are in green, while the Bulgarians [are]
in red. Here there is the inevitable connection between the colour red
and communism, and this contributes to the marginalisation of the
state.54
(Bulgaria in reference; emphasis mine)

An emphatic choice is made here in reading the colour symbolism. It

was equally possible for the red strip of the Bulgarian Quidditch team
here to recall the red worn by the Bulgarian football team when it beat
Germany in the 1994 World Cup Finals (as Popov observes in the essay
cited above). In this attempt to pass the choice made as obvious and inev-
itable, so as to support an argument about marginalisation of the state,
a located ideological investment is revealed in the critical voice itself.
In Bulgaria between 2000 and 2007, the employment of the above
postcolonial critical lens to deconstruct stereotypes and ‘othering’ strat-
egies resonated with the social, political and cultural concerns of the
country at the time. These contextual nuances were less explicit but also
available in the first full-length book on Harry Potter in Bulgaria: Lidiya
Denkova’s The Philosopher’s Secrets of Harry Potter in 2001.55 This publica-
tion unpacked the philosophical dimensions of the series for the benefit
of teachers and students. Addressed to adolescents and adults alike,
Denkova touched on topics such as ‘two worlds’, ‘the mixing of the two
worlds’ and ‘freedom of choice’ – all useful for drawing attention to
philosophical principles and paradigms. These topics were, however,
also increasingly central in socio-political developments in Bulgaria at
the time, especially in the context of aspiring to accession within the EU.
Similarly, essays by Bulgarian scholars related to Harry Potter and censor-
ship in various contexts56 outside Bulgaria in that period had a bearing
naturally on the Bulgarian context itself. Bulgaria had just emerged
from a period of official censorship and curbing of freedom of speech,
and was facing a resurgence of moves towards censorship as sporadic
representatives of Orthodoxy joined the ‘crusade’ against Harry Potter.57
A salutary example of academic work which has negotiated the
researcher’s identity and location in a more nuanced way while addressing
similar issues is available in Ludmilla Miteva’s essays and unpublished

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 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 195

PhD thesis ‘Humour in late 20th-century British Children’s Literature:

Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchett, J. K. Rowling’ (2008).58 The third chapter of
the work, ‘Establishing and Crossing the Boundaries of Ethnic “Other-
ness”’, deals with Goblet of Fire. The focus on humour allows the
researcher not only to identify and deconstruct stereotypes, but to do so
and distance the researcher’s voice from those being unjustly stereo-

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typed. This becomes effectively an exercise in looking for and finding
stereotypical constructions both ways.

The readers could laugh at the Bulgarian ‘blighters’, who want to trick
‘us’ and get hold of more seats . . . at the Bulgarian minister, who, it
seems, hasn’t heard of Harry Potter, at the grotesque figure of Krum
and his absurd linguistic incompetence, at the Veela . . . . Laughter
can be due to accepting that this is just a joke and ‘we really do not
think like that’. And yet, through humour we have seen through the
contrasts and have come to realize that ‘they’, ‘the blighters’, could
not have possibly been asking for tweezers, that Fudge is very stupid
since he assumes that the Bulgarian minister does not speak English
only because he comes from Bulgaria.59

Alongside such passages, where the critical perspective is carefully deper-

sonalised, there are moments when it is explicitly personalised. When
this occurs, however, the location and identity of the researcher is openly
acknowledged. The following analysis of the Durmstrang headmaster’s
tantrum (Goblet of Fire, p. 487) is a case in point:

I cannot deny the funny side of the scene, but to me it is funny in

a different way. Unlike the younger audience for which it is inten-
ded, my mind is burdened (I cannot disregard my memories). I am
laughing at the inadequacies of Karkaroff . . . with a degree of relief
because even if the fictional depiction is exaggerated, things used to
be more or less like that and now I can afford to laugh at the absurd-
ity of the system, in which we used to live and at the preposterous
leaders we used to have.60

Further on, by considering interchangeable views of an adult or a younger

reader, and a reader coming from an English-speaking or a Bulgarian-
speaking audience, Miteva manages to relativise her own position. In
the process, the stereotypical representations of non-Bulgarian fictional
characters are noted too (Dumbledore’s, for instance), which allows
her to observe that ‘the stereotypical image of the West, the Centre, is
just as implausible as the image of the Periphery or the former “enemy”’,61

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196 Re-Reading Harry Potter

and to conclude that ‘the fixed imaginary boundary between “us” and
“them” and especially its crossing are related to the interpretations and
relativising of [dichotomies] such as West-East and Self and Other’.62
Perhaps the balance that Miteva achieves has something to do with the
fact that by the time she completed her work in 2008, the key source of
tension in the Bulgarian connection of the Harry Potter phenomenon had

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been resolved – Bulgaria became an EU member state on 1 January 2007.

A very brief note on translation

In a generally ‘faithful to the original’ Bulgarian translation from the

English text63 it is worth noting a couple of tiny details which slightly
modify the Bulgarian rendering of the text in terms of its Bulgarian
‘trace’. Translating back from the Bulgarian these are:

• In relation to the portrayal of Viktor Krum: ‘sallow-skinned’ (Goblet of

Fire, p. 95) becomes ‘pale’; ‘very surly face’ becomes simply ‘surly face’.64
• In relation to the Bulgarian minister: ‘My Bulgarian opposite number’s
making difficulties and I can’t understand a word he’s saying’ (Goblet of
Fire, p. 82) becomes ‘My colleague on the Bulgarian side causes problems
and I can’t understand a word he’s saying’ (Bulgarian edition, p. 76);
‘The Bulgarian wizard suddenly spotted Harry’s scar and started gab-
bling loudly and excitedly, pointing at it’ (Goblet of Fire, p. 91) becomes
‘The Bulgarian wizard suddenly spotted Harry’s scar and spoke loudly
and excitedly, pointing at it’ (Bulgarian edition, p. 86); ‘Good job too,
these Bulgarian blighters have been trying to cadge all the best places . . . ’
(Goblet of Fire, p. 91) becomes ‘Good job too, these Bulgarians have been
trying to get hold of all the best places . . . ’ (Bulgarian edition, p. 86).
• In relation to the issue of accents, the English text renders the
Bulgarian minister’s English as follows:

‘Vell, ve fought bravely,’ said a gloomy voice behind Harry. He

looked around; it was the Bulgarian Minister of Magic.
‘You can speak English!’ said Fudge, sounding outraged. ‘And
you′ ve been letting me mime everything all day!’
‘Vell, it vos very funny,’ said the Bulgarian minister, shrugging.
(Goblet of Fire, p. 104)

In the Bulgarian edition the foreign enunciation is not reproduced,

and the difference in accent is transferred into descriptive/explanatory
narration:

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 The Bulgarian Connection in Harry Potter 197

‘Well, we fought bravely,’ said gloomily in correct English with a

strong hard accent somebody behind Harry. He looked around and
saw the Bulgarian Minister of Magic.
‘You can speak English!’ said Fudge angrily. ‘And you let me
wave hands and twitch [make faces] all day!’
‘Well, it was very funny,’ said the Bulgarian minister, shrugging.

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(Bulgarian edition, p. 98)

These small omissions and alterations for the most part and self-
evidently neutralise expressions which cast Bulgarians in a negative
light or which Bulgarians may find offensive. Instead of the hint of sick-
liness in ‘sallow-skinned’, the more neutral word ‘pale’ is used, which in
Bulgarian can be associated with ‘resolve and determination’. The
Bulgarian minister is recognised as a ‘colleague’ by Fudge, and by a
change of register as well since he is ‘speaking’ (Bulgarian to a Bulgarian
audience) rather than ‘gabbling’ (an unfamiliar language to English-
speaking audiences). Bulgarians are just ‘these Bulgarians’ and not
‘blighters’ (‘dosadnitsi’ is the Bulgarian equivalent), and they certainly
do not ‘beg’ as the use of ‘cadge’ implies. Finally, in the scene depicting
the exchange between Fudge and the Bulgarian minister, the slight
changes transfer the comic culpability from the Bulgarian minister to
Fudge, and that involves a slight shift in power relations too. The
removal of the accent (actually more Russian-like than Bulgarian-like in
the English text), is effectively the removal of something that English-
speaking audiences are apt to regard with amused condescension. A
‘strong, hard accent’ it may continue to be in the Bulgarian text, but
there’s nothing wrong in attributing ‘strong’ and ‘hard’ to Bulgarian
(whether in relation to the sound of the language or as a quality of the
people). Moreover, emphasising the ‘correctness’ of the English spoken
by the minister, while not contradicting the English source (the minis-
ter’s English is indeed grammatically correct; it’s the accent that is a
problem), is to the credit of the Bulgarian minister’s linguistic abilities.
At the moment when real Bulgarian politicians, government officials
and diplomats were concerned with ‘rebranding’ and ‘re-imaging’
Bulgarianness for internal and external consumption and were busy
with negotiations for EU accession, the Bulgarian translator of the Harry
Potter books was evidently doing something more or less similar –
adopting the role of diplomat and politician.

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23
Harry Potter in China

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With assistance from Cheng Xiao

Beyond the pale

To come to grips to any extent with the Harry Potter phenomenon in

China it is necessary to have the Harry Potter fluid text as a conceptual
horizon rather than foreground the original text and try to establish a
set of linear relations from it to the Chinese context. This is the case, as
observed earlier, for any text-to-world approach, but this is especially
pertinent when we focus on Harry Potter in China.
Insofar as a geopolitical location can be discerned within the original
English Harry Potter text, China is placed beyond the pale. There is obvi-
ously a much discussed sense of location that readers of the English text
are likely to be aware of. The Muggle–Magic world described marks its
British locations and plays out its Britishness clearly: in the naming of
places and persons, in the use of idioms and colloquialisms, in the rituals
of social exchanges (in news, shops, schools, offices, etc.), in the manifes-
tations of tacit class-consciousness. Working alongside these is a limited
sense of an extrinsic world: the Quidditch World Cup has Bulgarian and
Irish teams; there are magic schools abroad – the Beauxbatons in France
and Durmstrang in an unnamed northern European location; there are
stereotyped foreign characters; Charlie Weasley is a Dragonkeeper in
Romania. In particular, as discussed in chapter 22, there is a clear ‘Bulgarian
connection’. Further, there is also a careful accounting of the multicul-
tural world contained in Britain in the original text, especially in terms
of names and ethnicities. At both the axes of alluding to a world outside
Britain and taking into account the heterogeneous world inside Britain,
the original text presents the merest trace of gestures towards the exist-
ence of China. This trace is so uncertain and self-effacing that it serves

198

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 Harry Potter in China 199

more effectively to put China beyond the pale than to bring it to the
fore. Very incidental and low-key gestures efface a Chinese association
by making it. So, at the axis of manifestations from the world outside,
a Chinese Fireball dragon in the Goblet of Fire appears briefly. The origin
of different families of dragons is one of the ways in which the extrinsic
world is gestured towards:

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‘This is a Hungarian Horntail,’ said Charlie. ‘There’s a Common Welsh
Green over there, the smaller one – a Swedish Short-Snout, that blue
grey – and a Chinese Fireball, that’s the red.’
(Goblet of Fire, p. 287)

Now the dragon (and also the phoenix) is more central to Chinese
mythology and ubiquitous in Chinese iconography than anywhere else
in the world – so much so that numerous texts in the West metaphorically
refer to China itself as the ‘dragon’ (the ‘sleeping dragon’, the ‘rising
dragon’, etc.). And those who are aware of Chinese iconography know
that the Chinese dragon is not red (not unless political hues are being
metaphorically united with the metaphor of the Chinese nation as
dragon), and is associated with water and not fire (and is in fact quite
different in all its associations from the western dragon). The red Chinese
Fireball dragon therefore makes concrete in the Harry Potter magic world
a western misreading and misrepresentation of Chinese mythology
and iconography. While doing so, it diminishes the centrality of the
Chinese dragon, which appears here in an incidental comment and is
barely glanced at amidst other, more vividly visualised, more active
dragons. It turns out in Goblet of Fire that the Chinese Fireball is faced
by Krum, representing Durmstrang, in the first round of the Triwizard
Tournament, and (by Ron’s account) is dealt with by a blinding spell
which leaves the floundering dragon destroying some of her own eggs.
To try to make much of that would be to over-endow the slightness of
the Chinese allusion, the near-absence of China. At the other axis of
registering the world within multicultural Britain also there’s the merest
gesture towards a possibly Chinese association. Amidst the names indic-
ative of different ethnic origins is that of Cho Chang’s (Harry’s first love
interest), which sounds East Asian, and possibly Chinese. There is nothing
in the original text to give that association substance – no information
about Cho Chang’s background – but in the films she is embodied as
distinctly racially East Asian, Chinese. So there’s only the name to go by.
But even here things are murkier than the English reader might think.
The other ethnically defined names or ethnically ‘other’ characters are

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200 Re-Reading Harry Potter

unambiguously identified or identifiable: Angelina Johnson is described

as black; it is a good bet that Anthony Goldstein is of German origin
and probably an Ashkenazi Jew; Padma and Parvati Patil are very plausible
Indian names, with probably Marathi Hindu origins (both first names
redolent of Hindu religious significance). To the Chinese reader ‘Cho
Chang’ poses a problem: it doesn’t recall clearly any common Chinese

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name. The nearest sound equivalents to Cho have disagreeable meanings,
unsuitable for names. In the Chinese translations of the Harry Potter
books, the nearest sound equivalent which makes sense is chosen,
or Qiu Zhang (meaning Autumn), which sounds rather different. It
might occur to the English reader that while Chang sounds like a
generic Chinese name, Cho vaguely recalls that quintessential Oriental
woman, the Japanese Cho-Cho-San in Madam Butterfly. Both Cho and
Chang could be Korean family names rendered in English, but are
unlikely first names. At any rate, the name presents a vague East Asian
connection but a very tenuous Chinese one.1
The original Harry Potter text itself therefore promises little by way of
an entry point towards its travels to China, but the fluid text of Harry
Potter has made a remarkable inroad into China. And it is as a fluid text
that Harry Potter in China needs to be engaged. This is not so much a
matter of charting how the original text makes a passage to China, but
of discerning how flows of discourse and translation operate in China
to render the Harry Potter text malleable and fluid. The issue of transla-
tion is central to this, and that is the first to be addressed below. I
examine translation here as an interlingual transfer – from the English
to the Chinese – and also discuss the complicities and dissonances that
arise at cultural interfaces and due to market forces. The final section is
devoted to the reception of the Harry Potter text and phenomenon in
China, which is framed by constructions of contemporary Chinese
childhood.

Translations

Harry Potter came to wider attention in China with the simultaneous

publication of Chinese translations from the first three books in the series
by the People’s Literature Publishing House in October 2000. Even then
it was a remarkably confident entry: where children’s literature books in
China usually have a print-run of 10,000, the first three Harry Potter
translations had initial print-runs of 200,000 each. The enormous success
of the Harry Potter books in China is marked by the rising figures of first-
print runs for subsequent translations: the fourth (Goblet of Fire) had a

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 Harry Potter in China 201

first print-run of 400,000, the fifth and sixth (Order of the Phoenix and
Half-Blood Prince) of 800,000,2 and the final book of one million.3 The
Harry Potter fluid text in China is concerned pre-eminently with the
translated versions. Despite a strong drive to make English the second
language in China,4 consumption of the English editions there has been
relatively negligible. However, there is a similar kind of quantitative

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increase to be noted there too: about 200 English editions of the first in
the series were taken for sales in China, by the sixth (Half-Blood Prince)
the figure was above 10,000.5
Translating the Harry Potter English text into any language presents a
number of problems which need to be carefully negotiated. Reporting
on translations of the Harry Potter books into different languages, Gillian
Lathey points particularly to the following: markers of what is perceived
as Britishness, such as tone and humour; proper names (these often work
by aural assonance and verbal association rather than being straightfor-
wardly meaningful or conventional); and the use of dialect and register,
especially to indicate social status (for Hagrid and the house-elves, and
in a different way for Fleur Delacouer, for instance, to mark foreign-
ness).6 Translating from English to Chinese puts particular pressure on
some of these. This is principally because the written English alphabet
consists of letters which roughly represent a phoneme or sound, while
written Chinese characters (in practice, words usually have two or more
characters) are each a word, morpheme or semantic unit and represents
a meaning as well as a speech syllable. This means that in written
Chinese phonetic variations in speech are less easy to convey – written
Chinese is simply less malleable to represent non-standard speech. It
can easily be comprehended that insofar as, say, social status or foreign-
ness is suggested in English writing by the sounds of words enunciated
(as is the case for Hagrid or Fleur) this is impossible to represent in
written Chinese translation. Moreover, as I have noted, every Chinese
character represents a sound and concurrently has a meaning embedded
in it. Translating western proper nouns into Chinese, therefore, usually
involves finding characters that convey the nearest sound equivalent,
and either the meanings embedded in those characters are disregarded
or, sometimes, characters are carefully selected to convey both something
of the sound and some quality of the thing/person/place in question
(even if that Chinese meaning is not contained in the western proper
noun). Thus translating personal names into Chinese involves a com-
plex level of cultural negotiation. The translation of Harry Potter names
into Chinese is a good index of one of the levels of textual fluidity
involved here.

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202 Re-Reading Harry Potter

I have already mentioned the cultural slippages that attach to trans-

lating the name of the possibly Chinese Cho Chang. Perhaps these
slippages account to some extent for the remarkably scant interest that
Chinese readers evince in Cho Chang in Harry Potter fan websites. The
naming of this character is so full with ambiguity and ignorance from
a Chinese point of view that it is difficult to accept the appellation

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without some misgiving. Other fascinating cultural negotiations in
translating names can be discerned in the differences between the two
available Chinese translations of the Harry Potter books – the Taiwanese
ones and the ones produced in the People’s Republic of China men-
tioned above.7 The first name of Harry Potter itself is a case in point. In
early Chinese media reports on the Harry Potter phenomenon ‘Harry’
was translated naturally and conventionally with the characters
(ha li) where the character ‘ha’ is a pure sound character (as in the
laughing ‘ha ha’) and ‘li’ is the closer and smoother sound equivalent,
but, incongruously, means something like ‘inside’ (that meaning could
be disregarded). However, in the Taiwanese edition ‘Harry’ had already
been translated with the characters (ha lì), where the character ‘lì’,
though less smoothly enunciated, carries the more suggestive meaning
‘victory’. It was therefore decided that the Chinese edition would do the
same. Incidentally, ‘halì’ and ‘hali’ are not exactly homophones, and
are distinguished by different tones in Chinese (it is often difficult for
westerners to distinguish between the four tones used in Chinese). The
implications of ‘Harry’ immediately suggesting ‘victory’ in terms of
understanding the character and his role are themselves not insignifi-
cant. However that may work for Chinese readers of either version, it
would have no direct relationship to the English name ‘Harry’. Further,
a more telling example here appears with regard to the translation of
the name ‘Voldemort’. In the Taiwanese edition this was represented by
the characters (fo di mo) and in the Chinese by the characters
(fu di mo). The character ‘di’ means ‘earth’ and ‘mo’ means
‘devil’, the character ‘fo’ means ‘buddha’ and ‘fu’ means ‘crouching’. To
read ‘Voldemort’ as ‘devil crouching on the ground’ makes good sense;
but any association of ‘buddha’ with Voldemort is desperately mis-
placed. None of this has any bearing on the name ‘Voldemort’, which
to European ears may suggest something like ‘stealing from death’ or
‘causing death’. Understandably, the English trick of having ‘I am Lord
Voldemort’ as an anagram of ‘Tom Marvolo Riddle’ is impossible to
convey in the Chinese.
The business of translating names is but a small thing, but it spins
out into a mass of cross-cultural negotiations in translating from the

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 Harry Potter in China 203

English to the Chinese. We must bear in mind that Harry Potter in China
comes overwhelmingly in the Chinese. The Chinese translations are the
Harry Potter text of China, and are parcel with the fluid text we are con-
cerned with here. And the question of translating Harry Potter, for those
who pay attention to these things in China, has been a matter of anxie-
ties and uncertainties. One Mihepu (a pseudonym), for instance, has

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written many articles on different websites identifying mistakes made
in the Chinese translations, and at one point called for the correction
of 1,132 errors in the first eleven chapters of the Chinese edition of
Half-Blood Prince.8 Even the editor Ye Xianlian of the People’s Literature
Publishing House, which published the Chinese translations, observed
that they are probably imperfect: ‘there must have been some mistakes
based on misunderstanding the original’.9 I note this more to mark the
anxiety of translation in evidence here than to dwell on troubled ques-
tions of authenticity and faithfulness to the originals. Insofar as I am
dealing with the fluid text of Harry Potter, I may as well accept that it is
in the nature of fluid texts that mistakes made in translations may nev-
ertheless become a legitimately received aspect of that fluid text and let
the matter rest there. But the scope of translational fluidity in question
here needs a little more demonstration than those observations on
names allow. Without presuming knowledge of Chinese, this can be
conveyed to some degree by conducting exercises in back-translating.10
This involves having someone who is fluent in both languages translate
back into English from the Chinese translations without reference to
the English originals, and then to compare the result with the originals.
This can be a particularly revealing exercise when the passages in ques-
tion are those that presented unusual linguistic features in the original
text. By back-translating such passages it becomes possible to see whether
the unusual linguistic features of the original had been conveyed in the
translation.
To that end I have chosen two passages here from the first and last
books of the Harry Potter series where arguably something unusual hap-
pens in the use of language in the original text. These passages stand
out as unusual because the English of the original is generally idiomatic
but uncomplicated, relatively free of linguistic opacity and experimen-
tation. Back-translations of these are presented with comments below.
In such exercises there are always intractable factors like a degree of
bilingual competence, memory and contextual knowledge of the back-
translator, prior familiarity with the texts, etc., which may somehow
skew the results. Nevertheless the results are interesting.

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204 Re-Reading Harry Potter

The passage from Philosopher’s Stone which I selected describes the

moment when Harry steps into magic world for the first time, into
Diagon Alley. Some of the passages which decided my choice are:

The sun shone brightly on a stack of cauldrons outside the nearest

shop. Cauldrons – All Sizes – Copper, Brass, Pewter, Silver – Self-Stirring –

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Collapsible said a sign hanging over them. . . .
A plump woman outside an apothecary’s was shaking her head as
they passed, saying, ‘Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they’re
mad . . . ’
A low, soft hooting came from a dark shop with a sign saying Eey-
lops Owl Emporium – Tawny, Screech, Barn, Brown and Snowy. Several
boys of about Harry’s age had their noses pressed against a window
with broomsticks in it. ‘Look,’ Harry heard one of them say, ‘the new
Nimbus Two Thousand – fastest ever –’
(Philosopher’s Stone, p. 36)

The back-translation from the Chinese reads:

Bright sunlight flashed on a pile of pots outside the door of the near-
est shop. Above the pots hung a board with the words: ‘big pots
made of brass, tin, silver – all types – automatic-stirring, collapsible’.
A fat woman stood outside a medicine shop. As they passed her, she
shook her head and said, ‘Dragon liver, seventeen sickles per ounce,
they are mad.’
From a dark shop came a low and soft woo-oo sound, the shop sign
on the door said, ‘Yila Owl Shop – grey forest owls, horn-sounding
[like the French horn] owls, brown owls, snow owls’.
Several boys of Harry’s age had their noses pressed on the glass of
a shop window. Inside the window there were flying brooms. ‘Look,’
Harry heard a boy say, ‘that’s the newest type of Halo 2000 – highest
speed –’.

My reason for choosing this passage is that it performs, by the use of

language, something that is seminal not just for Harry’s but also the
reader’s entry into and continuing engagement with the magic world. It
mixes two registers: first, a set of words that are immediately associated
for English readers with something old-fashioned (often archaic words)
and sometimes specifically with witchcraft (through fairy tale and folk-
lore, through popular culture forms), such as ‘cauldron’, ‘apothecary’,
‘broom’, ‘sickle’ (associated with harvests and druidic rituals), ‘pewter’;

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 Harry Potter in China 205

and second, the linguistic strategies of modern advertising, snappily

referring to innovations for convenience (‘self-stirring – collapsible’),
listing types of products (‘copper, brass, pewter . . . ’, ‘Tawny, Screech,
Barn . . . ’), giving the catchy brand-name (‘Nimbus 2000’). The manner
in which the two registers are seamlessly mixed both brings alive in a
contemporary sense, and updates the associations of, magic world. In

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the back-translation the second register (of advertising) is conveyed
clearly enough, but the first is conveyed only to a limited extent – ‘pot’
doesn’t have the specific witchcraft associations of ‘cauldron’, the
‘brooms’ have to be made to fly to bring out that nuance, ‘medicine
shop’ doesn’t have the air of quaintness of ‘apothecary’, the ‘sickle’ in
Chinese is a pure sound translation and meaningless in itself. And yet
the limited sense of old-fashioned fantasy of the first register is given a
particular turn in the Chinese version, in that the whole passage comes
with a stronger sense of the exotic – strange happenings and things
made stranger by the unmistakable foreignness (from the Chinese point
of view) of this environment. This sense of foreignness can be discerned
in the slightly more laboured manner in which the back-translation
reads compared to the original: it is more carefully precise, a bit more
particular about positioning and explaining the relation of people and
things in Diagon Alley. The negotiation with proper nouns also has a
role to play here, but I won’t go into this again.
The other passage I had chosen for back-translation, from Deathly
Hallows, is of a completely different sort and describes the long-awaited
final duel between Harry and Voldemort:

A red-glow burst suddenly across the enchanted sky above them, as

an edge of dazzling sun appeared over the sill of the nearest window.
The light hit both of their faces at the same time, so that Voldemort’s
was suddenly a flaming blur. Harry heard the high voice shriek as he,
too, yelled his best hope to the heavens, pointing Draco’s wand:
‘Avada Kedavra!’
‘Expelliarmus!’
The bang was like a cannon-blast and the golden flames that
erupted between them, at the dead centre of the circle they had been
treading, marked the point where the spells collided.
(Deathly Hallows, p. 595)

There is an attempt here to perform through language the extra, almost

excessive, significance of this climactic moment, appearing as it does
after six earlier climaxes. The language itself is excessive: it comes with a

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close collection of words connoting an explosion (performing an explo-

sive climax) – ‘sudden’, ‘burst’, ‘hit’, ‘bang’, ‘blast’, ‘erupt’, ‘collide’; and
a high density of words suggestive of burning (setting the stage alight,
so to say) – ‘red-glow’, ‘dazzling’, ‘flaming blur’, ‘golden flames’. And in
thus stretching the language to perform the climax, the sequence of
events described in this passage is overtaken by the enormity of this

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moment. Instead of appearing as a series of moves, the duel seems to
become compressed into a speeded up, somewhat overwritten, blur.
The back-translation of this passage comes up with the following:

A flash of red light suddenly exploded from the end of the wand,
burst out to the sky, flying over their heads, becoming brilliant like
the halo around the sun. After that this beam of light crossed over the
nearest window sill and shone on Harry’s and Voldemort’s faces, and
Voldemort seemed like a fireball. Harry heard a sharp scream, so he
collected all his concentration and, holding Draco’s wand, shouted.
Avada shoumingzhou! [sound character for ‘avada’, the rest literally
‘life-taking spell’]
Chouniwuqi! [‘expel-weapons’ command]
A great sound like a canon came. Golden sparks spread between
them. The circle they had been turning around became a circle of
death at this moment. At the centre of the circle two spells clashed.

Though some of the blur of overwriting, linguistically performing the

significance of the climactic moment, is preserved, it is interrupted by
a need to clarify the sequence of events here. The slippage in identifying
the first source of the red-glow is an understandable mistake which
derives from the need to clarify causes and consequences. So is the qual-
ification of the circle they were treading as a ‘circle of death’, as is the
breaking down of one sentence into four after the spells are cast. Whether
this is rooted in some way in the Chinese language or derives from this
translator’s inclinations is a moot point; it is part of the Harry Potter fluid
text in China.
The kind of close, text-based approach to the negotiations that occur
within the fluid text of Harry Potter as it disperses in China – the focus
on interlingual translation – that I have dwelt on so far is only one
aspect of the levels of translation involved here. The most important
point to grasp here is that the interlingual translation of the English edi-
tions into the Chinese is a planned and relatively small part of a larger
process of translation. What actually happens here is that the entire
Harry Potter phenomenon, at all levels – as an advertising and marketing

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 Harry Potter in China 207

phenomenon, as a reading phenomenon, as a media phenomenon, as

a phenomenon registered as such by academics and educationists, as a
socio-cultural phenomenon – was systematically translated into China
on an industrial scale. This is hinted at even if we take note of the manner
in which the interlingual translation of the texts themselves was con-
ducted. The Chinese translations of the first three books in the series

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were completed within three months: translators were commissioned in
June 2000 and the translated books were available by October 2000. All
the subsequent translations were produced within three months of the
appearance of the English editions too (translators were only given the
English versions once they had been officially released). The translation
process was itself overseen by the publishers in a functional and efficient
fashion for quick turnovers and consistency and with little opportunity
for mulling over ambiguities and translators’ equivocations. The most
revealing overview of this grand translation project, and the place of
interlingual translation within it, has been given by the Head of the
People’s Literature Publishing House, Ye Zhenning. In a 2002 speech on
‘The Development and Marketing of Harry Potter in China’11 he laid
out the overall structure of the project to translate the Harry Potter phe-
nomenon into China. It was based on the perception that despite their
success in the West, the series might not do well in China. The expecta-
tions of children’s literature in China seemed to be different, the record
of foreign bestsellers wasn’t encouraging and the Harry Potter books
seemed at that stage not to have done well in the nearest comparable
Eastern market, Japan. The project of bringing Harry Potter to China
therefore became a considerably larger one than simply translating the
books and making them available. The format of the book itself, as a
physical object, was designed carefully to stand out in the Chinese con-
text. The size of the books, the page layout, the colour of the paper
(chosen to discourage piracy) and print quality were all carefully thought
through. Chinese illustrators were invited to work on illustrations and
covers, but were finally rejected in favour of the American design (with
the covers embossed). Beyond the physical shape and appearance of the
books, distribution and retailing were carefully organised. An extensive
media campaign was orchestrated in advance of publication – through
websites, and broadcast and print media. Posters were printed informing
readers of the international acclaim of the series. The first three books
were released simultaneously nationwide on 6 October 2000 at 10 a.m.,
with performances by Chinese actors in bookstores. Media awareness was
maintained thereafter in a programmatic fashion. Harry Potter branded
gifts and postcards were produced. Favourable scholarly articles and

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208 Re-Reading Harry Potter

statements from intellectual authorities were engineered. Within a short

period the entire apparatus of fandom and externally established frames
for structuring individual and institutional reception was translated and
transplanted into China in 2000, adjusted and modified for the Chinese
social context, and maintained thereafter. In some sense, it thereby trans-
formed literary production and reception in China. The interlingual

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translation of texts was a crucial but small part of the overall project.
The self-reflexive critical reception of Harry Potter that resulted in China
was determined by this vast translation project. But critical reception
and reflection also necessarily and almost always manage to escape any
planning and engineering, and are uncontainable. How this has
unfolded in China occupies the final section of this chapter.

Constructing childhood

In April 2008 I was fortunate in being given the opportunity to initiate

and participate in a workshop on ‘Harry Potter in China’ at the Institute
of World Literature, Peking University.12 This consisted of two brief
presentations and discussions between students (‘post-1980s’ and ‘post-
1990s’ generations, i.e. those who were born in those decades and had
grown up with the Harry Potter phenomenon in China) and academics.
The issues covered seem to represent most of the strands of discussion
of the Harry Potter phenomenon in China insofar as I have been able to
gauge these from news features and scholarly publications. This section
is in two parts: the first gives a summary of the deliberations in this
workshop; and the second is a commentary on that summary, offering
context-specific clarifications and linkages.

The workshop

Presentation 1
Wang Xiaoya, representing the People’s Literature Publishing House,
observed that, up to April 2008, ten million copies of the seven Chinese
Harry Potter books had sold, and the last in the series alone had already
sold one million copies. These were records for Chinese reading materials
for children. Before publishing the Harry Potter books, the People’s Liter-
ature Publishing House had focused primarily on classics of European
literature. The Harry Potter books were also the first for which a Chinese
publisher had bought rights, since prior to that such permissions were
controlled by the state. The Harry Potter series was therefore the first to
break into the Chinese market in an independent fashion, and has started

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 Harry Potter in China 209

a trend which has subsequently grown. Consequently, the number of

books available in China has multiplied, and closer links have developed
between China and the outside world.

Presentation 2
This was by Zhuang Zi, an editor of China Youth Publishing House, who

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has been responsible for publishing a series of Harry Potter fan fiction
by Chinese authors. He took a more analytical approach to the Harry
Potter phenomenon. By way of presenting a ‘reading of the readers’, he
observed that the series has nourished two Chinese generations since
2000. In his view the texts are about a boy who is always ‘running
toward the future, and running to take up responsibility and assume a
leadership role’. The boy grows as the series progresses and readers
grow with him. In China these readers are primarily of the so-called
‘I-generation’ of the ‘post-1980s’ and ‘post-1990s’, and the success of
these books shows that they have satisfied a desire to discover through
reading what these generations are looking for.
According to Zhuang, since the 1990s Chinese society has entered a
period of transition, and current social values are no longer the same as
previous ones. However, the education system and attitudes to bringing
up children that prevail in China have remained unchanged and are
now anachronistic. Chinese books for children tend to be didactic and
old-fashioned and construct children as passive instruments for social
progress. Education and upbringing seem based on notions of devotion
and dedication to social causes, which the ‘I-generation’ often regard as
inauthentic. This generation is itself more focused on the individual self
or ‘I’ (expecting social good to be achieved through individual fulfil-
ment) and is not accustomed to thinking in terms of a collective ‘we’ –
Zhuang cited some surveys to support these points. There is, therefore,
a widening gap between the generations, and a vacuum in provision for
the ‘post-1980s’ generations of China through education and intellectu-
ally stimulating reading. At the generational level, Zhuang understands
this as a growing deficit of ‘love’, with parents functionally focusing on
achieving success through their children, and children cultivating a
more self-centred worldview. This deficit of ‘love’ is also ingrained in
the education system, which is unable to bridge the generation gap and
nurture the new generation’s worldview. The latter is more global than
before, in tune with a globalised and networked world. Zhuang discerns
a broader political crisis behind this, since China is now opening up to
and becoming an agent of globalisation itself (in contrast to the main
agent of globalisation so far, the United States, which, particularly since

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210 Re-Reading Harry Potter

September 2001, has been retreating into protectionism), and it is

incumbent on the Chinese to prepare future generations to embrace the
opportunities available to them.
The Harry Potter books, with their unstinting ability to face up to human
nature in a realistic rather than idealistic fashion (including depictions
of cruelty, cowardice, betrayal, loneliness, death), while presenting both

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a strong concept of love and a powerful sense of individual ability as
collective good, have served to stem the sense of alienation that the new
generation in China feels. In this, they also mediate this generation’s
growing global consciousness. But the crisis is far from over, and China
needs to respond to current educational needs and development more
actively.

Discussion 1 – about generation gaps

Objections were voiced by some, who identified themselves as of the
‘post-1980s’ generations, to their being characterised as suffering from a
deficit of ‘love’. Perhaps these objections arose from misunderstanding
Zhuang’s observation as a criticism of that generation in itself rather than
as characterising a prevailing socio-cultural formation. It was averred
that the construction of the ‘post-1980s’ generations as lacking ‘love’
was a mistake commonly made by earlier generations. Such a construc-
tion has to do with the ‘post-1980s’ being the first generation in China
to be almost entirely composed of single children, who are seen as spoiled
and selfish. But such sweeping statements are no more than generalised
nonsense. The generation gap in China has widened because of the cul-
tural insularity of earlier generations compared to the greater openness
and sense of being connected to others (through new media, for instance)
in the ‘post-1980s’ generations.

Discussion 2 – about modes of communication

One of the respondents observed that she was first introduced to the
Harry Potter books through a reading on the Central Broadcasting Radio
Station, in the long-running radio programme ‘Novel Reading’ [xiaoshuo
lianxu guangbo]. She felt that more than as texts which satisfy some
abstract reading desire among children, the success of Harry Potter in
China is due to their being available in media that children engage con-
stantly – the internet, films, audio media. Another respondent argued
that Chinese kung fu fantasy novels have been successfully transferred
to different media, but that doesn’t mean that they have become glo-
bally successful. The crucial factor is language: the Harry Potter books
have reached a global readership because they were written in English,

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 Harry Potter in China 211

the world’s dominant language. In some sense, it was felt, Chinese read-
ers were responding both to the Harry Potter text’s affinity with fantasy
fiction in Chinese forms and to its strangeness in deriving from an
exotic, western tradition and location.

Discussion 3 – about postmodern childhood

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This strand drew largely on Buckingham’s After the Death of Childhood
(2000)13 to argue that in the postmodern, globalised environment earlier
constructions of childhood and adulthood as separate had been ruptured.
The exposure to adult realities that electronic media have brought to
children is part of this process, and in this Chinese children are partakers
of a large global change in sensibilities. The Harry Potter books, with their
unabashed representation of the darker side of life, chime in with this
change. That also explains, as one respondent pointed out, why the
phenomenon is not confined to children but extends to adults too – in
China as much as elsewhere.

The prodigious quantity of Chinese Harry Potter fan fiction available on

the internet was not discussed in the workshop despite Zhuang’s pres-
ence and role in making such fan fiction available in print form. This is,
however, a significant element of the fluid Harry Potter text in China,
with context-specific nuances which cannot be disregarded. It also has
a bearing on the discussion about generational divides above. I present
some observations on Chinese Harry Potter fan fiction, along with fan
fiction elsewhere, in the next chapter.

Commentary
The workshop arguments summarised above are pre-eminently addressed
to the Chinese context that surrounds and receives the Harry Potter text,
and do not really engage the text itself. This is consistent with pretty
much all Chinese media coverage of and scholarly work on the Harry
Potter text and phenomenon thus far. Just by being a success, by selling
well, by being popular, by sustaining a phenomenon, the Harry Potter
text is taken as a priori ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ (moral connotations intact).
So Chinese critical reception of the Harry Potter text very rarely expresses
the kind of scepticism about the text itself available in, for instance,
Jack Zipes’s or Andrew Blake’s books14 or in the 2002 chapters of this
one. The congratulatory view of the Harry Potter text in China does,
however, involve a constant restatement of the textual content in ways
that resonate particularly there. Thus, at different times, it is the exotic,

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212 Re-Reading Harry Potter

western roots of the text, the plotting, style and character development
of the text, the representation of some value (love, heroism, individual
achievement, realistic portrayal of human nature, etc.) in the text, that
is highlighted as that which makes it ‘worthy’ or ‘good’. But in every
instance the ‘goodness’ or ‘worthiness’ of the text is taken as a foregone
conclusion. Thus, an academic paper by Li Nishan maintains that the

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Harry Potter books arouse feelings of happiness and freedom full of
‘western magic-colour’ [xifang mohuan secai], encourage role-playing
and childhood development, and ‘moistens and lifts the soul’;15 one by
Huang and Liang examining the double-world narrative argues that the
books stimulate the ‘creative force, and helps the spirit fly’;16 and another
by Zhang and Kong on Harry Potter in the context of contemporary
children’s literature is largely a eulogy.17 The argument typically goes as
follows: the Harry Potter text is ‘good’ and ‘worthy’ – its success in China
has done ‘good’ there – and the reason it has done ‘good’ in China is
because there are such-and-such lacks, such-and-such unfulfilled desires
and aspirations, in the social and cultural and political formation of
China. The ‘good’ and ‘worthy’ impact of the Harry Potter text provides
an opportunity to put those deficiencies into perspective and to correct
them. There is an unmistakable and pervasive prescriptive strain of self-
criticism, self-improvement, self-development in the Chinese reception
of the Harry Potter text and phenomenon.
Along with that, the workshop discussions (also in keeping with
published criticism) assume that the Harry Potter text and phenomenon
are pretty much exclusively about and for children (in the broad sense
of including early teenagers). This is actually not in keeping with indi-
cations of consumption in China: according to a survey reported in 2007,
the majority of Harry Potter readers in China are aged between 14 and
24.18 But it is generally taken for granted that if readers need to be con-
sidered, they are undoubtedly children and the books are clearly addressed
to children. With these preconceptions in view, the Chinese critical
response to Harry Potter typically makes two linked moves: first, use
Harry Potter to characterise – and thus effectively construct – childhood
in contemporary (2000 onwards) China; and second, discern how Harry
Potter departs from, and may be used to modify, the provision of reading
material and education for Chinese children.
The characterisation of childhood in the workshop deliberations
interestingly revolve around decadal generational divides: ‘post-1960s’,
‘post-1980s’, ‘post-1990s’. This terminology is prevalent in mass media
and academic discourse in China at present. It is worth pausing briefly

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 Harry Potter in China 213

here because it demonstrates the precise manner in which characterising

and constructing childhood are coeval. On the one hand, the artificial-
ity and neatness of decadal generational distinctions seems to be at
odds with what is obviously a flowing and continuous social process
and experience. It is evidently used as a way to impose structure on an
amorphous area, with arbitrary chronological markers to pin down a

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slippery process (much as historiography generally does sometimes in
terms of decades or centuries). The decadal terminology also suggests
that such a structure is not ideologically-led and has at least the appear-
ance of neutrality. As Shao Yanjun observes in a paper on the Chinese
phenomenon of ‘pretty women writers’:

The so-called ‘pretty women writers’ derived from a young and gifted
group of serious litterateurs who were called the ‘post-seventies writ-
ers’. The latter term was consequent upon the earlier phrase ‘post-
sixties writers’. These purely chronological terms are different from
earlier characterizations of literary groups in China, such as ‘rightist
writers’, ‘educated youth writers’, ‘root-finding writers’, ‘avant-garde
writers’, etc. Since the 1990s the tendency in China has been to
demarcate writer groups not according to their experience and stylistic
or ideological tendencies, but only according to the period they were
born in. Through ‘post-sixties’, ‘post-seventies’, ‘post-eighties’, to the
nascent ‘post-nineties’ writers, this method of chronological division
has continued, demonstrating that Chinese literature has entered a
phase in which there is no dominant theme and no mainstream.19

On the other hand, the device of decadal generational divides has caught
on because it seems to make sense in China. This has something to do
with the pace of social change in China, which is seen as being so rapid
that each decadal generation could be meaningfully assumed to have
significantly different formative experiences – especially in the first
decade of childhood – in relation to each other. Thus, the ‘post-1950s’
generation would be the first to be entirely formed under the Chinese
socialist system (after 1949); the ‘post-1960s’ generation would have
their formative years marked by the Cultural Revolution; the ‘post-1970s’
generation would be the first to have grown in the post-Cultural Revo-
lution and post-Mao (d. 1976) period; the ‘post-1980s’ and ‘post-1990s’
generations would be the first to consciously assimilate to a 1990
onwards market-socialist transformation, and also the first to be com-
posed almost entirely of single children (following the one-child policy

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214 Re-Reading Harry Potter

from 1979). Not uninterestingly, the Harry Potter phenomenon also

appears in China at the significant decadal (indeed millennial) moment
of 2000.
So, unsurprisingly, a structuring device that is assumed as a conven-
ience (like a grid) for locating social processes begins to gather a life of
its own. The characterisation of the ‘post-1980s’ and ‘post-1990s’ gener-

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ations – the Harry Potter generations – as such seems to immediately
construct them in analytically preconceived ways. Children become
personified, as a whole, as individualistic or materialistic or media savvy
in a market-socialist environment, which in China is corporate capital-
ism with centralised planning. And contemporary childhood generally
comes to be assessed in terms of children being single progeny and
therefore spoilt, self-centred and more dependent on friendships and
extrinsic relationships. With such a construction of childhood in place,
understanding the Harry Potter text and phenomenon in China involves
fitting the phenomenon to the construction. This is clear in the work-
shop deliberations, and can also be evidenced in a range of mass media
features and scholarly publications in China. The argument in the latter
is also that the Harry Potter books and phenomenon fit this decadal
characterisation of contemporary Chinese childhood in a way that chil-
dren’s literature and educational provision available in China does not.
This has been a constant refrain: for instance, Zhang and Kong castigate
Chinese children’s writing for lacking originality, being ‘adultised’, hav-
ing a lecturing tone, being too didactic in contrast to Harry Potter;20
Ni Lishan argues that the Chinese educational system curtails thinking
and enjoins responsibility in a soul-destroying fashion, from which Harry
Potter has provided welcome relief;21 using Harry Potter as an example,
Xu Yurong wonders why Chinese children’s literature deters children
from reading while British children’s literature give children pleasure;22
and so on.
The Harry Potter text and phenomenon have been placed amidst that
perceived slippage between the construction of contemporary childhood
in China and the children’s literature or educational system of China.
Harry Potter is seen as repairing that slippage, constructing a bridge. Equally,
Harry Potter is seen as highlighting the slippage. And, in doing so, another
turn of the screw, so to speak, is revealed within the construction of
contemporary Chinese childhood. The perception of the slippage and con-
sequent reception of Harry Potter are symptoms of a deep-seated anxiety
about constructing childhood itself in China. The idea is that Chinese edu-
cational systems and children’s literature have in the past constructed,
and still continue to construct, childhood in a way that has rendered

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 Harry Potter in China 215

children unhealthily passive. Children were constructed in terms of the

‘greater good’, some idea of a rigid, top-down social and moral order
along socialist or, for that matter, Confucian lines. Children were con-
structed to absorb this order passively through education and books.
The anxiety now is that for children of the ‘post-1980s’ generations this
placing them in passivity is no longer desirable or possible. Children

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from the ‘post-1980s’ generation onwards have become active agents who
are, at least tendentiously, outside the control of such determination
and socialisation. They are spilling outside the confines of whatever is
perceived as Chinese (very materially through new media), refusing to
subscribe to formerly entrenched notions of social and moral order, and
are interrogating the prerogatives of adults (parents). The extrinsic inflow
of Harry Potter into China, and the embracing thereof by children, is
therefore signified in the workshop, in mass media reports, in scholarly
writing as symbolic of a coming to life of the child’s agency in China.
It is difficult to say whether, and to what extent, this mode of thinking
about Harry Potter in China stands up to historical experience and evid-
ence. As in the workshop discussions, so in all the published sources
cited above, the argument is made impressionistically. Little empirical
and analytical research seems to inform their asseverations.23 Their
arguments involve a series of equally loosely founded constructions,
based on few facts and few observations, as much of contemporary and
past childhood, as of China’s present and past educational systems, and
as of Chinese children’s literature now or earlier. In terms of the last, it
is debatable whether such Chinese texts as were available to children
during, say, the Cultural Revolution24 – that most extreme pole of
‘other’ times – would have given them a social or political worldview
that is radically different from the Harry Potter text. The children of the
Cultural Revolution, for instance, had access to ‘revolutionary martyr
stories’ in textbooks (such as stories about Liu Wenxue, Dong Cunrui,
Huang JiGuang, Qin Shao Yun) which were redolent with violence and
death and heroism. These would have conveyed to them a clearly mor-
ally divided universe of good and evil, dark and light. As in Harry Potter,
the moral division could have been accounted as an external one: the
‘good’ or ‘just’ revolutionary social order in China as opposed to the
imperialist capitalist reactionary western powers. And also as in Harry
Potter, the moral schism could have been placed within the everyday
psyche of Chinese people themselves: in terms of the ‘reactionary’ or
‘bourgeois’ tendency that may be discerned in anyone, even within the
Party itself. Perhaps the difference is primarily that the Harry Potter
books are unambiguously categorised in the genre of fantasy, and can

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216 Re-Reading Harry Potter

therefore be taken light-heartedly, while those ‘revolutionary martyr

stories’ were reality in their time, and therefore grimly serious; or per-
haps the fantastic nature of the latter were not wholly unperceived even
at the time, though it was expedient not to acknowledge it. And further
back, the rich tradition of Chinese fantasy writing with Confucian over-
tones, and their contemporary renovation in the form of historical

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romances and martial arts fantasies, also calls for a complex accounting
in this context. There are many inconclusively engaged questions and
uncertainties here, and the prevailing reception of Harry Potter in China
outlined above is, ultimately, far too schematic and impressionistic.
Ironically, this overly schematic reception arguably reiterates, through
its uncritical acceptance of the Harry Potter text and phenomenon as
‘good’ and ‘worthy’, through its unanalytical approach, something of
the penchant for rigid ordering that such reception ostensibly seeks to
counter.
But these uncertainties and ambiguities are part of something larger
within China, something that exceeds the singularity of the Harry Potter
text and phenomenon. The latter are a minuscule bubble in a much
larger effervescence in the social and cultural and political formation of
contemporary China. This is the effervescence of a prevailing sense of
being in transition, of a ubiquitous sense of ‘opening up’ and ‘catching
up with the West’, of a vaunted sense of assuming a significant place in
globalisation processes – all clearly expressed in the workshop delibera-
tions outlined above, and in numerous mass media and scholarly
works. This sense causes a particular sort of anxiety in the China where
Harry Potter appears. Equally, the recognition of ‘China’s rise’ causes
another sort of anxiety – a sort of fear – in the Anglophone West, where
Harry Potter comes from. Numerous recent popular accounts of the rise
of China written in the UK and USA are symptomatic of this.25

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24
The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text

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Fan fiction text

The Harry Potter fan fiction text – a phenomenon in itself – has assumed
its current, extraordinary, sprawling and expanding proportions almost
entirely in the environment of the Internet, by exploiting the possibili-
ties of global social networking. According to Tara Collins, by January
2006, popular fantasy fiction texts had attracted fan fiction writers in
the largest quantities, especially the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the
Harry Potter series; but whereas fan stories posted online for the former
were estimated at 36,000, for the latter they exceeded 180,000.1 The
technology of the Internet is intricately enmeshed with the development
of the phenomenon. Between the possibilities offered by the techno-
logy and the ability to exploit (and sometimes serendipity in working
with) those possibilities the cultural form of fan fiction has dispersed
and linked up, visibly and traceably, in ways that were impossible in the
fanzine era. The entire Harry Potter phenomenon has unravelled as the
electronic environment for social networking has been consolidated:
within the frame of the development of blogging and web chatrooms
from the mid-1990s, and the increasing popularity of social networking
websites like MySpace and Facebook post-2000s. If the success of Harry
Potter fandom demonstrates the success of niche media rather than
large, centralised media corporations, then it also points to the facility
with which niche media can now link up and generate new niches
through networking, as Henry Jenkins observed in 2007.2 Jenkins had
by then theorised this process as one of ‘convergence’ in his book Con-
vergence Culture (2006), where he reminds readers that such convergence
is ultimately not simply through media appliances but in the ‘brains of

217

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218 Re-Reading Harry Potter

individual consumers and . . . their social interactions with others’.3 The

dynamic Harry Potter fan fiction text emerges from the Harry Potter fans
and materialises through technologically facilitated convergence, wherein
the textual creativity of Harry Potter fans is woven with the process of
the Harry Potter series (which unfolded over ten years) and phenome-
non. It is this interwoven quality that actuates the Harry Potter fluid

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text, of which the Harry Potter fan fiction text is as much an integral
part (really a very large part) as the original Harry Potter text itself, and
as indeed the various other textualisations of the Harry Potter phenome-
non are. So integral is the fan fiction text to the Harry Potter fluid text
that from a world-to-text perspective it can hardly be overlooked: it has
become an auto-perpetuating area of textual production (with a guide-
book for writing specifically Harry Potter fan fiction in the market)4 and
academic attention (the first book-length study was announced as this
was being written).5
The Harry Potter fan fiction text, therefore, exemplifies much current
thinking about fan fiction and textuality generally, often in ways that
rebound into literary critical theory and practice at the broadest levels.
To begin with, such fan fiction is predominantly in electronic text and
hypertext form and is therefore available to writers and readers who can
interact with the text. Electronic texts and hypertexts have been widely
understood as involving various kinds of departure from conventional
notions of print text because of the possibility of interactiveness. Thus,
for Jay David Bolter, electronic texts opened up the possibility of ‘inter-
active fiction’: ‘a nonlinear fiction, which invites the reader to construct
a dialogue with the text’.6 In this, writers would be called upon to think
of their work not as ‘a closed and unitary structure’, but ‘as a structure
of possible structures’, and readers would cultivate the ability to become
a ‘second author, who can then hand the same text to other readers for
the same treatment’.7 Similarly, Silvio Gaggi observed that hypertext
entails an empowerment of the reader in that he or she can construct
his or her own paths of reading and even interfere in the text by creating
new links and inserting comments; that hypertext thereby challenges
the concept of the author as a unitary presence and leads to ‘encourage-
ment of collaboration in the creation of knowledge and their capacity
for a free, rapid, and unimpeded dissemination of knowledge’;8 and that,
consequently, hypertexts lead to the development of an ‘interactive
literature’, untrammelled by mediating authorities and industries.9
Within the interactive electronic text/ hypertext, the contemporary fan
fiction text is defined as being anchored to an original text (in this case
Rowling’s Harry Potter text), using characters and settings provided by it,

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 219

and is typically circulated within a fan community, often while being

available to a wider circle of fans outside the immediate community.
Since the intertextual horizon and interactiveness of fan fiction is thus
circumscribed, there is a participative aspect to it: fan fiction writers and
readers are largely identified as such by participating in a fan community.
Insofar as the fan fiction text is conceived at that nexus of participation,

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it is generally approached less as a stable and analysable entity in itself
and more as expressing the interactive and participatory nature of fan-
dom itself. Thus, Lanier and Schau’s examination of three Harry Potter
fan fictions demonstrates that the departures from the original text in
these serve ‘the creation of the symbolic structures and meanings of a
particular form of pop culture’, that is, they ‘contribute to the “meta-
text” that binds the Harry Potter community together’.10 The fan fiction
text, and fan communal participation in it, thus apprehended can be
read and framed with distinct normative thrusts. So, on the one hand,
Henry Jenkins’s celebratory approach finds in and around the Harry Potter
fan fiction text (he focuses on fan communities of children) evidence
that children are:

active participants in these new media landscapes, finding their own

voice through their participation in fan communities, asserting their
rights even in the face of powerful entities . . . . At the same time,
through their participation, these kids are mapping out new strate-
gies for negotiating around and through globalization, intellectual
property struggles, and media conglomeration.11

In Jenkins’s view, the fan fiction text gestures ultimately towards a new
democratic global politics of participation through consumption com-
munities.12 On the other hand, in a less than celebratory vein, Cornel
Sandross understands the fan text (in general, not specifically Harry Potter
fan fiction) as possessing a superlative fluidity of textual boundaries at
the level of both production and consumption, which makes it impossible
to outline an aesthetic for such a text. To Sandross this is not so much
indicative of emancipative possibilities, as indicative of entrapment in
banality and Marcusean one-dimensionality – ‘one-dimensionality aris-
ing out of a lack of alternative resources or “enabling devices” of the
self’.13
On a related but different note, the constitutional fluidity and com-
munal negotiability of the fan fiction text necessitate a less convention-
ally text-centred approach on the part of scholars who reckon with fan
fiction – and, therefore, introduce a level of fluidity in critical practice

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220 Re-Reading Harry Potter

itself, and call for reconsideration of critical conventions and academic

categories. This is expressed succinctly by Busse and Hellekson:

As fan academics, we inhabit a fluid space that needs to be continu-

ously revised and reconsidered, where new influences, both internal
and external, change not only the object of study, but our theore-

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tical and methodological frameworks. Like the fantext, with its
complementary and contradictory readings of the source text, the
academic text seeking to describe and understand fandom also
creates a work in progress as it attempts a larger understanding of fan
culture.14

So from a literary studies point of view, the fan fiction text presents an
object for literary analysis which doesn’t subscribe to the conventional
form of objects within the purview of that academic discipline, and by
doing so puts pressure on the existing presumptions of the discipline of
literary studies itself. It seems to call for what are at present marginal
strategies (indeed, barely conceptualised as strategies) within the disci-
plinary practice of literary criticism: something like ‘distant reading’
(being able to assimilate the characteristics of a superlative textual field
by not undertaking close reading),15 or ‘autoethnography’ (fan fiction
writers becoming critics/critics becoming fan fiction community partic-
ipants), seem more to the purpose here.16
Given the plethora and complexities of the Harry Potter fan fiction
text, one way in which it may be engaged here is in a symptomatic
manner: i.e. it can be engaged insofar as it is symptomatic of something
pertinent to this study. The world-to-text thrust itself recommends a
foothold: the Harry Potter fan fiction text can be accounted insofar as it
presents strands which exemplify interventions in worldly concerns, and
interventions which disrupt the original Harry Potter text to spread the
flow of the Harry Potter fluid text. In picking up such strands, this chapter
continues the argument that has unfolded over the last three and yet
in a different direction, and at the same time brings this study to an
admittedly open-ended conclusion. The three strands that I pick up
briefly below have to do with Harry Potter fan fiction, first, in relation to
children’s literacy, second, insofar as they play on homosexual desire,
and third, in relation to its crossing-over into published book form in
China. A few concluding remarks on the bearing that this discussion of
Harry Potter fan fiction has on the understanding of fandom in general
brings this study to a close.

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 221

Literacy – slash – China

Harry Potter fan fiction and literacy

That computer-mediated communication among fans evidences consid-
erable creativity was observed even in the earliest fan communities:
Nancy Baym, for instance, examined this with reference to exchanges

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on the USENET rec.arts.tv.soaps site for television soap fans, established
in 1984.17 The notion that fan fiction internet sites are a positive peda-
gogic environment for learning basic literacy for children was asserted
influentially by Henry Jenkins in 2004 in his Technology Review blog
entitled ‘Why Heather Can Write: Not everything kids learn from pop-
ular culture is bad for them, some of the best writing culture takes place
outside the classroom in online communities’.18 Jenkins later expanded
on this in Convergence Culture.19 This argument was principally woven
around the development from 1999 of the Harry Potter Daily Prophet
fan website by Heather Lawver (then 14 years old). Like the fantasy
magic world newspaper Daily Prophet, this site takes the form of an
online newspaper, with children around the world assuming magic per-
sonalities and contributing reports about magic issues in the Harry Pot-
ter-related magic worlds that they have imagined in their – and in terms
of their – specific locations and lives. Though anchored to the original
Harry Potter text, the Daily Prophet website works by exploiting a lack or
gap in it which has been noted in the previous two chapters: the pre-
dominantly British confines of the Muggle–Magic world in the original text
leaves the magic world beyond open to speculation. The Daily Prophet
website is effectively a participatory communication environment in
which children as Harry Potter fans worldwide feel encouraged to read
and write, to be communally creative fan fiction writers and readers. Its
success was evidenced when Warner Brothers sought to control the use
of the Harry Potter brand in fan websites by issuing notices ordering the
closure of such websites in 2000–1. The Daily Prophet network initiated
the Defense against the Dark Arts organisation, which called for a boycott
of all Warner Brother products, and Warner Brothers capitulated by
largely withdrawing the notices – the so-called ‘Potter wars’. In Convergence
Culture Jenkins extended his 2004 argument about the Daily Prophet
website (it also picked up on other Harry Potter fan fiction sites, such as
FictionAlley and Sugar Quill) by linking it squarely with its role in the
‘Potter wars’. The latter seemed to confirm Jenkins’s sense that children
were taking possession of their creativity against establishment disappro-
bation. He regarded this as a positive step, and consistent with children

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taking possession of their education, by developing literacy – reading

and writing skills – through participation and interaction in online fan
fiction communities (affinity spaces). Jenkins regarded the latter as
providing an alternative pedagogic space, possibly a more effective one,
than the establishment pedagogic space of the classroom:

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Educators like to talk about ‘scaffolding,’ the ways that a good peda-
gogical process works in a step-by-step fashion, encouraging kids to
try out new skills that build on those they have already mastered,
providing support for these new steps until the learner feels sufficient
confidence to take them on their own. In the classroom, scaffolding
is provided by the teacher. In a participatory culture, the entire com-
munity takes on some responsibility for helping newbies find their
way.20

And further:

It is not clear that the successes of affinity spaces can be duplicated

by simply incorporating similar activities into the classroom. Schools
impose a fixed leadership hierarchy (including very different roles
for adults and teens) . . . . Schools have less flexibility to support writers
at very different stages of their development. Even the most progres-
sive schools set limits on what students can write compared to the
freedom they enjoy on their own.21

Jenkins’s point was that though fan fiction writers and readers may
not necessarily be looking to learn, this is nevertheless a good medium
for learning to happen because participants feel more in control, and fan
fiction should therefore be encouraged. Soon after, Jenkins and his
assistants published the McArthur Foundation report Confronting the
Challenges of Participatory Culture (2006),22 which argued that such tech-
nological resources as fan fiction sites, blogging, etc. should be garnered
for new literacy purposes, which includes both basic literacy and media
literacy in a cohesive fashion. The report also gave a defence of fan
fiction writing against accusations of being derivative and unoriginal,
by drawing attention to analogues with the respectable art form of
the collage.23 Meanwhile, since 2004, considerable academic research
appeared, supporting the notion that such participative learning through
online communities is an effective way of developing literacy skills, and
especially through online fan fiction communities, in the work of
Rebecca Black and others.24 In the interim, the possibility of developing

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 223

literacy through online fan fiction communities has been embraced by

some of these communities, markedly the one that Jenkins had used as
a case study to set out the argument in 2004. By 2008 the Daily Prophet
website carried a paper entitled ‘Making Progress toward Revolution’
addressed to fellow Harry Potter fans:

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Let’s make this the biggest grassroots campaign in the history of
Harry Potter fandom! In 2001, The Daily Prophet and its fellow Potter
fans were responsible for making huge waves on the international
stage and setting legal precedents that protect all fans to this day
through the infamous Potter War campaign. We can do this again,
but for an even greater cause – literacy.25

On the website a letter from Heather Lawver also appeared, addressed to

adults, explaining what the Daily Prophet is trying to accomplish in the
following words:

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, I believe, merely opens the door to

diving into a good book. By creating an online ‘newspaper’ with arti-
cles that lead the readers to believe this fanciful world of Harry Potter
to be real, this opens the mind to explaining books, diving into the
characters, and analyzing great lit. By developing the mental ability to
analyze the written word at a young age, children will find a love for
reading unlike any other. By creating this faux world we are learning,
creating, and enjoying ourselves in a friendly utopian society.26

What Jenkins had observed as possibly happening in fan fiction online

communities is here sought to be achieved actively by fans – or at least
their spokesperson – in such communities.
A few pertinent observations about this argument for the possible
literacy-enhancing function of fan fiction communities are worth mak-
ing here. First, the argument is articulated through rhetorical tactics which
are suggestive of normatively-loaded progressiveness. It is more these
rhetorical strategies than evidence and analysis that push the argument
forward. So, the neat oppositions that Jenkins sets up work more by the
over-determination of oppositional placement than by meaningfully
referring to anything: the hierarchical ‘classroom’ versus the communal
sharing of online fan communities, the teacher/parent-controlled envir-
onment versus the alternative anti-establishment fan community, learners
taking possession of their learning versus the imposition of learning
from above. It is not clear where this ‘classroom’ is; it seems to be a

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synecdoche for all institutional pedagogy. It is not clear whether allow-

ances can be made for formal and informal modes of learning and
development which occur within all pedagogic institutions, inside and
outside classrooms. No one participating in a classroom – students or
teachers – seems to be consulted about what happens in a classroom and
why he or she is there; it is characterised by a series of assertions. While

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the structure of online communities is outlined briefly, the everyday
life of such communities is not touched. The possibility and reality of
fractiousness, misunderstanding, misinformation, hierarchies, authori-
tarianism in online communities are not examined. Both the classroom
and the fan fiction community seem to exist in a political and economic
vacuum. It is the rhetoric of opposition, the discourse of alternative
spaces, the radical touch of self-possession and self-determination which
push the argument. By the time Lawver (as fan leader and as exemplary
child speaking to adults) sets about disseminating the argument within
her fan fiction forum, the rhetorical associations are crystallised and
foregrounded in an inflated verbiage which is reminiscent of and yet
detached from political application: ‘progress . . . revolution’, ‘grassroots
campaign’, ‘greater cause’, ‘friendly utopian society’. The whole thing
sweeps along by an uncomplicated equation of fan fiction reading and
writing being equated with developing literacy skills (without pausing
on the conditions in which these may be equated) and by an uncompli-
cated equation of Harry Potter fans with children (as uncomplicated as
assuming that the original Harry Potter text is children’s literature) – both
unexamined equations enabling a pat insertion of worldly concerns
about children’s education and basic literacy into the Harry Potter fan
fiction text and phenomenon, with the effect of garnering normative
approval for fan fiction online communities in general. Second, in an
interesting way the polyvocal expansion of the Harry Potter Magic–Muggle
world by exploiting a gap of the original text which is practised on the
Daily Prophet website (and arguably many fan fiction websites) – and
the implicit subversions and interrogations of the originals that therefore
occur there – are constantly countered by harnessing them to an enunci-
ated assertion of the normative position of the Harry Potter original text.
The latter serves as a frame for containing the former, and imposing
communal order in the online community – if the normative assertion
is accepted as an article of faith, any amount of critical and creative
practice and subversion can be accepted. This is apparent in the contra-
dictions of Lawver’s rousing calls for literacy: here the contradictions
of using fantasy as reality to a ‘good’ end struggle with the notion of
developing analytical skills. More importantly, these calls are predicated

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 225

on the understanding that any Harry Potter book is a priori a ‘good book’
or ‘great lit’ (a sort of Arnoldian touchstone) which will lead to a taste
for and discernment of the good and the great. There are various ways
in which this underlying article of faith may work in Harry Potter fan
fiction communities which are not considered in the celebratory dis-
course of the above argument. It is possible that, despite allowances for

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the variety of readings and rewritings implicit in fan fiction stories, at the
level of literacy the aspiration is to write as well as or in the style of the
original Harry Potter text, thus setting an unquestionable standard for
literacy. It is also possible that since the very structures of interactive-
ness in fan fiction communities (the ‘scaffolding’ of affective learning)
that Jenkins lauds are premised on and made possible by the given,
unquestioningly accepted, normative place of the original Harry Potter
text, the use of those structures by specific fan writers and readers actu-
ally serve to constantly confirm that normativeness and to homogenise
views of that original text as a rigid, unnegotiable entity. That this is
likely to occur in fan communities was observed in another context
(science fiction fandom) by Andrea MacDonald: ‘Through computer
networks, fans easily share their conceptualization of fictional universes,
encouraging a more uniform understanding of the fictive universe.’27
Third, the development of the above argument could be thought of as
occurring amidst a renegotiation of fan identities: essentially, Jenkins
takes certain examples of fan fiction writers, such as Lawver, and con-
structs them in a particular way, and then the fan fiction writer (Lawver
again) strives to subscribe to that construction. It is worth asking to
what extent something implicit in online fan fiction communities has
been discerned in the above and to what extent the nature of such fan
fiction communities has been altered through the above. And it is also
worth pondering whether Jenkins’s position and authority as expert have
been devoted to describing an existing state of affairs or instrumentalised
to moulding a new one.
The second of these observations is relevant also to the other two areas
of the Harry Potter fan fiction phenomenon that I go into briefly below.

Harry Potter slash fan fiction

Much of the Harry Potter fan fiction that has appeared online explores
sexual relations by imagining (often improbable) pairings of Harry Potter
characters.28 This is generally true of the fictional productions of different
fandoms, but it probably has a particular resonance in the Harry Potter
fandom. Since gender and sexuality are depicted along conservative lines
in the original Harry Potter text (as I argued in 2002), the potentialities

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226 Re-Reading Harry Potter

of magic in this regard are kept very low key (almost nothing apart from
a few love potions are mooted) in that original text. But the concept of
magic inevitably lends itself to exploitation along the lines of sexual
drives and fantasies, and it is hardly surprising that the gaps in the ori-
ginal here have been rich resources for fan fiction. In keeping with fan
fiction generally, almost as many works of Harry Potter fan fiction have

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been of the so-called ‘slash’ (describing same-sex pairings and sexual
relations) as of the ‘het’ (describing heterosexual pairings and relations)
variety. In a survey of Harry Potter slash fan fiction in 2006, Marianne
MacDonald noted that: ‘Although the “het” stories may still outnumber
the slash stories, this would be a close call. Indeed the volume of Harry
Potter slash fiction is rather staggering. A conservative estimate would
peg the number at over 25,000 stories posted on the Internet, but the
real total could be closer to 100,000.’29 As with slash fan fiction gener-
ally, a majority of Harry Potter slash focuses on male-male pairings, and –
as confirmed by a survey conducted by MacDonald – are written by
women in their twenties. Exploration of the phenomenon of male-male
slash fan fiction being produced by women pre-dates the case of Harry
Potter,30 and is an issue I don’t go into here.
The impetus for slash Harry Potter fan fiction can be conceptualised
along the lines of ‘queering’ the ‘heteronomrativeness heroism’ of the
original Harry Potter text, as Hugh and Wallace have put it.31 In an
autoethnographic vein, this sort of impetus is described succinctly by
the academic and Harry Potter slash fiction writer Ika Willis:

It is through writing fan fiction that a fan can, firstly, make space for
her own desires in a text which may not at first sight provide the
resources to sustain them; and, secondly, recirculate the reoriented
text among other fans without attempting to close the text on the
‘truth’ of her reading: but these desires and these demands circulate
unpredictably, in ways conditioned by the discontinuities between
the author’s world and the fictional world, or by (for example) cross-
gendered or multiply gendered identification.32

Willis demonstrates the workings of this impetus both by reading the

ostensible absence and possibility of discerning implicit queerness in the
original Harry Potter text and by reading two of her own slash Harry Potter
stories as efforts at inserting or opening a queer space in Hogwarts. But
this account is not of the slash fan fiction writer as fan, but of the queer
theorist/activist who follows up a critique of the popular cultural original
text by capitalising on its fandom and fan fiction communities – to

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 227

bring to awareness and act on a queer political agenda. This is not dis-
cernibly the writer who is a fan writing fan fiction; this is a writer who
writes fan fiction to be able to exploit the fan fiction online space for a
specific political purpose.
While the insertion of the absent or silenced or coded (depending how
one reads) queer desire in the original Harry Potter text with a view to

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assuming a political position might motivate some slash fiction writers,
the relation to the original is arguably more complicated. MacDonald
has suggested that the popularity of the Draco–Harry and Snape–Harry
pairings in fan fiction shows ‘an underlying humanism on the part of
the slash writers in their desire to reconcile two enemies’.33 If that is so,
it also shows an underlying desire for reconciliation rather than con-
frontation as the mode for resolving the conflicts of the original text. In
other ways too, slash fan fiction writers and readers seem to express as
much a desire for reconciliation with the original text as sensitivity to
its contradictions – in fact, paradoxically, the tendency is to confirm the
normativeness of the original by digging into it, inserting into it, against
its grain. In fact, often the apparently oppositional movement of slash
fan fiction is actually expressive of a desire for containment within and
recognition by the original text, the canon-holders, the authoritative
author, the establishment underlying the Harry Potter phenomenon.
The joy with which slash fans receive almost slightingly insignificant
signs and gestures from that canonical proprietorship-exercising heart
of the phenomenon attests to this. Along these lines a 2004 paper by
Green and Guinery thus observed:

Latterly, there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making

subtle overtures to creators of fanon. . . . This sense within the fan
community – that the holders of the canon have complimented
them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds
the momentum of the fan engagement . . . . Specifically, Harry/Draco
slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy
to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a
Defence Against the Dark Arts class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
Azkaban [film]) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution
to the Harry Potter phenomenon.34

In a similar vein, Rowling’s ‘revelation’ in October 2007 that Dumbledore

was gay and was in love with Gindelwald was generally received uncrit-
ically by fans and academic fan-watchers such as Tossenberger.35 The
Observer report on this concluded on an interesting note: ‘Amazed by

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228 Re-Reading Harry Potter

the warm reaction of the audience, Rowling, on her first US tour in seven
years, joked: “Just imagine the fan fiction now”.’36

Chinese Harry Potter fan fiction in print

A certain amount of media interest in the US and UK has been devoted
to Harry Potter ‘counterfeits’ or ‘fakes’ in China. These texts are deriva-

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tive of the original Harry Potter text in the same way as fan fiction, but
have appeared in print rather than simply online and may therefore be
understood as produced to make profits, whereas online fan fiction in
itself often explicitly eschews any such motive. Consequently, the media
discussion has been characteristically dismissive. A couple of New York
Times write-ups in August 2007, for instance, dealt with these as symp-
tomatic of Chinese disregard for copyright regulation, and briefly out-
lined the plots of some ‘fakes’ by showing them up as evidence of
bizarre Chinese tastes (the brief outlines were deliberately designed to
make them appear completely nonsensical).37 It is difficult to distinguish
whether these were simply expressing moral outrage about copyright
infringement in China or scoffing at Chinese fan fiction writers and read-
ers in an implicitly racist fashion. Howard W. French observed: ‘Here,
the global Harry Potter publishing phenomenon has mutated into
something altogether Chinese: a combination of remarkable imagination
and startling industriousness, all placed in the service of counterfeiting,
literary fraud and copyright violation.’38 Perhaps French wasn’t aware
that such derivative Harry Potter fiction is legion in the US and elsewhere
in online forums, that the Chinese are therefore not unique in writing
and reading these (it is not ‘altogether Chinese’), and that the imagina-
tion and industriousness in these are not ‘all placed in the service’ of
those dire, antisocial ends. All the Chinese ‘fakes’ named in the New York
Times articles are fan fiction which appeared in print form after initially
appearing online, and are distinguished from fan fiction elsewhere simply
by virtue of appearing in print. Whether they appeared as such with the
fan authors’ consent, or whether the authors have profited from them,
is not clear. It is, however, worth noting that the texts thus identified
did not appear in print as fan fiction – the printed versions did not
declare them as such. A 2006 paper by Lena Henningsen had already
tried to engage with them ‘not simply as an economic and legal dispute,
but as a cross-cultural and multidimensional phenomenon’,39 which
makes sense since they are as much within the Harry Potter fluid text as
any fan fiction. With close attention to two such Chinese ‘counterfeits’ –
the notorious Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-up-to-Dragon (Hali Bote yu
buozoulong), largely plagiarised from Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and Harry Potter

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 229

and the Porcelain Doll (Hali Bote yu ciwawa), both published as books in
200240 – Henningsen traces the Chinese and western traits in each. She
finds that in both books Chinese readers are likely to find associations
with the form of traditional knight-errant fiction (wuxia xiaoshuo), as
well as resonances with some Chinese ancient and modern classics. Both
have, at different levels, comments pertinent to contemporary China: the

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former touches on official corruption in a way that would be particu-
larly meaningful in China, and the latter reads like a tourist guide for
China and expresses the kind of nationalist sentiments that are current.
Henningsen concludes that:

the debate on the Harry Potter fakes should not be conceived as a

matter of copyright infringement only. Rather, the counterfeit texts
offer a number of different readings . . . – and thus offer different
interpretations of Harry Potter and different visions of the world:
Western dominance versus Chinese moral and strategic superiority;
and the West as the source of evil or as a location for imagination
and as the Other. These readings offer a better understanding not
only of the Harry Potter phenomenon but also of the Chinese reality
and its perception by both Chinese readers and authors.41

Chinese Harry Potter online fan fiction could be regarded as peculiarly

Chinese in much the way that Henningsen understands the printed
‘fakes’ to be. The ‘fakes’ are distinguished as ‘fakes’ only by the print
form and by their lack of acknowledgement of being fan fiction. That
the switch from electronic publication to print publication can drive
such a powerful categorical imperative into the Harry Potter fluid text,
and such a morally loaded one, is worth pausing on. It says a great deal
more about the contemporary legal and political control of the material
forms of textual production and consumption than about what is con-
tained, so to say, within the fluid text. But there is more to the transfer
from online to print than that, and here too developments in the Harry
Potter fluid text in China are indicative. More recently, the prestigious
China Youth Publishing House (Zhonguo qingnian chubanshe) has been
publishing as printed books some of the most popular Harry Potter online
fan fiction. These are explicitly presented as fan fiction, and are based
on valid agreements with their fan authors (usually teenage women).
The two I have examined – As Fallen as an Angel (Xiang tianshi yiyang
duoluo), 2005, and Introduction of Plum Blossoms (Meihuayin), 200542 – are
quality paperback productions, in a consistent format and design. These
present interesting contrasts and similarities, and are representative of

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230 Re-Reading Harry Potter

a range. Both revolve around the Draco–Hermione pairing. The former

is set entirely within Britain and with the original text characters, and is
written in a style that would immediately suggest a foreign context to
the Chinese reader (free of set phrases and quotations from Chinese lit-
erature, using a somewhat ‘pretentious’ register). Debates current in the
Chinese media, however, resonate with some of the extended conversa-

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tions in it, especially with regard to Harry’s moral responsibilities and
Draco’s freedom. The latter book inserts a key Chinese character in
Hogwarts, which is also a means for inserting a Chinese concept of magic
and even takes the action to China. It is written in an obviously Chinese
style – idiomatic, smoothly expressed, with occasional quotations from
Chinese poetry. Both are reminiscent of Taiwanese romances which are
immensely popular in mainland China. What distinguishes these quite
standard fan fiction works in print from their online versions is not the
textual content, but the manner in which they are framed in print. In
particular, both appear with a ‘Publisher’s Announcement’ (the same in
both). This gives a definition of fan fiction, explains in what sense these
could be regarded as derivative of the original Harry Potter text and in
what sense they are original, and encourages potential readers to go
through Rowling’s books first (thus, arguably, seeking to expand their
market rather than interlope). More interestingly, this also gives a reason
for taking these seriously – not in their own terms, but as data which
reveal something about fandom and about the current (in China ‘post-
1980s’) generation:

Another reason for publishing Harry Potter fan novels is to sieve,

study and ponder the enormous phenomenon of Harry Potter fans,
their thoughts and minds, the tide of the popularity of Harry Potter,
and to thus better understand the psyche of the generation that has
grown up with Harry Potter. . . . By publishing these novels we pro-
vide research data for society to be able to check the pulse of the
young generation, study the direction of their thinking, and thereby
guide their development. As the publisher with responsibility for
providing a service toward the development of youth, this is our
responsibility and ultimate aim.
(translated from the Chinese)43

In other words, just by becoming available in the print medium it is

expected that fan fiction will expand outside fan communities and come
under the purview of academics, policy-makers and others with a scholarly
interest in Chinese youth culture. The resonances of this purpose with
the workshop debates in Peking University reported in the previous

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 231

chapter are unmistakable. The print form deliberately takes the fluid
Harry Potter fan text into establishment and institutional enclaves where
conventional books still reigns supreme.

Fans

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Studies of fans and fandom have gone through an interesting set of moves
over the last couple of decades,44 in which the last decade has seen
quite a bit of the developing argument woven around the Harry Potter
phenomenon. One significant strand in this has been occupied by
attempts to conceive and reconceive fans as politically active agents in a
consumer capitalist environment – increasingly, the world. This strand
can be traced from, for instance, Lawrence Grossberg’s 1992 characteri-
sation of the political agency of fans in the following words:

because the fan speaks for and to the question of authority, or from
within an ideology of excess (which constructs a certain critical dis-
tance), the politics of the fan never entails merely the celebration of
every investment or every mattering map. The fan’s relation to cul-
ture in fact opens up a range of political possibilities and it is often
on the field of affective relations that political struggle relates with
popular concerns. In fact, the affective is a crucial dimension of the
organization of political struggle45

to the following 2007 observations by Henry Jenkins – undoubtedly the

academic who has invested most in activating the political agency of
fans within an emancipative register – in view of recent commercial and
economic commentaries:

None of these commentators on the new economy are using the

terms ‘fan’, ‘fandom’, or ‘fan culture’, yet their modes rest on the
same social behaviors and emotional commitments that fan scholars
have been researching over the past several decades. The new multi-
pliers are simply a less geeky version of the fan – fans who don’t wear
rubber Spock ears, fans who didn’t live in their parents’ basement,
fans who have got a life. In other words, they are fans who don’t fit
the stereotypes. These writers are predicting, and documenting, a
world where what we are calling ‘fan culture’ has a real economic
and cultural impact . . . 46

Despite Jenkins’s upbeat, future-gazing tone, the direction is clear: from

the idea of the fan as an eccentric entity which can be activated and

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232 Re-Reading Harry Potter

attributed political agency with effect on the establishment (in a ‘political

struggle’) to the idea of the fan as a normal presence that is so completely
co-opted and embedded in the establishment that it becomes meaning-
less to even name it a ‘fan’. It is likely that the critical discourse which
has tried to make common cause with the fan by observing/constructing/
becoming/deconstructing the fan is itself complicit with this process.

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The hopes and failures of the critical discourse that plays the idea of
the fan with political effect does so by exploiting a paradox that has
been most cogently articulated in Matt Hill’s autoethnographic explora-
tion of the interfaces of academic and fan discourse. The paradox rests
on the perception that the fan is at the core of a series of binary oppo-
sites that structure much critical discourse. One of the most obvious of
these is the positioning of the fan between consumerism and resistance:

While simultaneously ‘resisting’ norms of capitalist society and its

rapid turnover of novel commodities, fans are also implicated in these
very economic and cultural processes. Fans are, in one sense, ‘ideal
consumers’ . . . since their consumption habits can be very highly
predicted by the culture industry, and are likely to remain stable. But
fans also express anti-commercial beliefs (or ‘ideologies’, we might
say, since these beliefs are not entirely in alignment with the cultural
situation in which fans find themselves).47

Hill proceeds to place fandom between other such binaries: community/

hierarchy, fantasy/reality, cult/culture, etc. This attempt at allocating
complexity and fluid boundaries to the idea, which has been so enthu-
siastically irrigated by critical cultural theory, is a valuable one, mainly
because it presents an optimistically misconceived tactic. Hill consistently
presumes the in-betweenness of the fan, the ideational or conceptual
space of the fan is between those polarities. It is a great deal more likely
that the fan is actually always before the fact, before any critical enter-
prise along the lines of either binary pole, already there, available, ready
to be observed/constructed/emulated/deconstructed in whatever direc-
tion critical discourse turns, seeping through the structures of critical
practice itself. The academic engagement with fandom tries to make
something of fandom that suits it from something that is already there
in an unwieldy fashion. Depending on the critical expectation, the fan
therefore appears and disappears in the span of two decades, flickers
with promise and dims into normality, through the structures of cultural
critical practice itself.

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 233

The a priori quality of the fan could be thought of as reflexive of the

a priori presumptions which actuate fans and fandom. Even the very
cursory account of Harry Potter fan fiction above conveys a sense of some
of these presumptions. The immense creativity evident in fan fiction
that stretches the Harry Potter fluid text constantly and in unexpected
ways is premised on the normativisation of the Harry Potter original

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text. Even where the fan text seems to undermine the core assumptions
and interrogate the basis of that original text, it is still with its norma-
tiveness unquestioningly reiterated as an article of faith or as an act of
homage. The normativised object is pushed so far posterior to the prac-
tice of fandom that it cannot be dismissed as a norm: all creativity and
subcultural activity and communal identification take place on the con-
dition of the original text’s normativeness. I have touched on this in
the context of the argument about literacy and fan fiction writing. The
normativeness also expresses itself in an anterior direction: in a desire
to enter the canon, in the associative logic which super-signifies the
authority of the author, the authorised corporations, and predictably
and constantly consume their production and reproduction of the ori-
ginal text. That slash fans are beguiled by the little hints of approbation
they perceive from Rowling and Warner Brothers and confirm them-
selves through these, as noted above, is symptomatic of the anterior
desire of the fan for incorporation within the norm. The authorities that
perceivably speak for the norm and from within the establishment can
therefore easily set up a constant self-moulding and self-production of
fans. All it needs is a bit of encouragement. When the academic fan
guru Jenkins says an encouraging word or two about fan communities
by taking up the virtuous cause of literacy, Daily Prophet fans accept it
wholesale and turn it into a drive, a cheering agenda for ‘revolution’. In
the course of engaging this they may well question Jenkins’s argument
and critically explore the notion of literacy, but only after first norma-
tivising the original Harry Potter text and author and associated produc-
ers; second, the guru status of Jenkins and his disciples; and third, the
pursuit of literacy as a social good – as if these are a coherent whole on
which all else can be constructed. Just as suavely, fans can be encour-
aged into self-production and self-moulding by mainstream corporations.
Prestigious publishers, in China for instance, can do this by deliberately
making fan fiction the subjects and objects of their production and
marketing; all they have to do is acknowledge the normative position of
Harry Potter. Other corporations do it more tacitly and perhaps more
effectively. A small instance of this is provided in observations by
Mitchell and Reid-Walsh on the Warner Brothers website for fans before

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234 Re-Reading Harry Potter

the release of the Philosopher’s Stone film. The latter offered fans an
expensive interactive environment with facilities for mutual engagement,
role-playing, games and structures for the exclusion of Harry Potter non-
readers, which in effect manufactured an online fan community and
‘created an audience for the film before the product yet existed’.48 Fans
are reactive in every conceivable direction and can stretch the Harry Potter

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fluid text in every conceivable direction, but only after the fact of nor-
mativising that original Harry Potter text and accordingly placing it on
an unassailable pedestal. Critical engagement with fandom is after the
fact of fans being such. Every kind of manipulation is possible of ideas
and products and consumption practices and political aspirations with
fans so long as fans are already given and available as fans.
The world-to-text inferences made above from Harry Potter fan fiction
are about fandom in general, and reflect on the world in general. These
are not specifically concerned with children as fans or worldly concerns
to do primarily with children. Focusing on children particularly in this
context – in the way Jenkins does apropos the Daily Prophet website – is
still conditional to the world in general, pervasively an adult world. In
fact, it must be clear from this and the preceding two chapters that the
Harry Potter fluid text, and therefore the Harry Potter phenomenon, has
mostly to do with adults, and children, if they appear at all, are constructed
in keeping with adult concerns and prerogatives. That, for instance, the
Chinese construction of childhood in the context of the Harry Potter
fluid text there coheres with wide-ranging socio-cultural changes in
China at large has already been noted. Noting the all-encompassing
complicity of adult interests in the Harry Potter fluid text takes me back,
in a way, to the point where this project began when I started in 2002.
At that time, arguing that the Harry Potter text and phenomenon have
more to do with adults than with children was a relatively laborious
business. Several chapters had to be devoted to making the argument.
Interestingly, now this is barely necessary: the adult occupation of the
Harry Potter text and phenomenon is not particularly hidden. This is
especially clear when the part of fan fiction in the Harry Potter fluid text
is in focus. Judging from a cursory survey of Harry Potter fan fiction web-
sites, at least half are by definition adult and deal with adult concerns
and sexually-explicit material. But even for the Harry Potter original text
in itself, the subterfuge of thinking of it as children’s literature and of its
adult readers as deviants is beginning to be abandoned. In the early
2000s, much discomfort was caused by critics such as A. S. Byatt, Jennie
Bristow and Stephen Pollard49 who suggested that the adult readership
of the Harry Potter books was a symptom of the infantilisation of

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 The Harry Potter Fan Fiction Text 235

contemporary society. They took it for granted that the whole Harry
Potter phenomenon is a children’s affair, wherein the presence of adult
interlopers is a noteworthy and rather disgraceful quirk. It is now clear
that the adult presence is not so much a deviation as the norm of the
Harry Potter fluid text and phenomenon and is, by most indications,
taking explicit possession of the original text itself. As the final volume

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of the series appeared in 2007, most of the indicators picked up by
observers pointed to Harry Potter becoming ever more overtly an area of
adult consumption. A Pew Research Centre survey showed that: ‘Those
aged 65 and older are among the least likely to buy the book (11% say
someone in the household will buy the book). Among those aged 50–64,
however, 26% say they have plans to buy the new book.’50 For that age
group that is a remarkably large number. The UK retailing chain Water-
stone’s reportedly found that there was a steady increase in pre-orders
of adult cover Harry Potter books as the series progressed: for the initial
editions the figure stood at 15 per cent of pre-orders, by the sixth vol-
ume it had risen to 23 per cent, and by the last book it was well over
45 per cent.51 Perhaps most indicatively, a Book Marketing Limited survey
of 2004 (questioning 10,000 individuals aged 12–74) found that more
than 60 per cent of the Harry Potter books in 2003 were bought by
adults. Moreover, as a summary of the survey in the Bookseller put it:
‘The figures also suggest that Harry Potter has not helped grow the chil-
dren’s books market. Instead, sales to children under 12 years old are
reported to have fallen in each of the last three years.’52 Evidently, Harry
Potter in all its aspects – as original text, as fluid text, as phenomenon –
is a predominantly adult area and intricately entwined with the adult
world, or the world at large.
The conclusion that this chapter, and this study as a whole, reaches is
not a particularly complicated one and can be summed up in a couple
of sentences. From a world-to-text perspective the balance of the world
as a globally networked negotiation between regulated production/con-
sumption for the profit of the few and unregulated fluid textuality for
the benefit of the many is perceivable in the celebratory creativity of fans.
From a text-to-world perspective unthinkingness, in the sense I explored
in 2002, continues to thrive and expand and become consolidated
within that balance.

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Notes

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Chapter 1
1. The following editions of the Harry Potter series are used for this essay:
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury,
1997); J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London:
Bloomsbury, 1998); J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(London: Bloomsbury, 1999); and J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of
Fire (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). Different publishers and countries have
different images on the covers of the Harry Potter books. A country-by-country
view of book covers is available at www.openflame.com/harrypotter/
book_covers.shtml. Most of these images are similar to those on the original
Bloomsbury editions.
2. See Wolfgang Iser on the ‘dialectical structure of reading’ in The Implied
Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 294.
3. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 34.
4. Stanley Fish’s notion of interpretive communities and interpretive strategies
is best given in Chapter 1 (‘Introduction, or How I Stopped Worrying and
Learned to Love Interpretation’) and Chapter 6 (‘Interpreting the Variorum’)
of his Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).
5. See, in this context, Stanley Fish, ‘Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser’, in
Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in
Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 68–86; and Wolf-
gang Iser, on Fish in ‘Interview 42’, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary
Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 66–9.
6. For attempts at coming to grips with the actual reader see Norman Holland’s
Five Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), and David
Bleich’s Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
7. Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986).
8. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature
from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 170–2,
explains why and what Zipes calls the Harry Potter ‘phenomenon’. What this
essay considers this phenomenon as consisting in is elucidated in Chapter 3.

Chapter 2
1. Dick Lynch, ‘The Magic of Harry Potter’, Advertising Age 72:50, 12 October
2001, p. 26.
2. Quoted in Kera Bolonik, ‘A List of Their Own’, in Salon Magazine, 16 August
2001, at www.salon.com

237

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238 Notes

3. Ibid.
4. The figures given here are mostly available on the NPD web-site at
www.NPD.com
5. Amelia Hill, ‘Harry Potter Magic Fails to Inspire Young to Read More’, Guardian
Unlimited (www.guardian.co.uk), 5 May 2002.
6. For example, Bill Adler ed., Kid’s Letters to Harry Potter from around the World:
An Unauthorized Collection (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001); Sharon Moore

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ed., We Love Harry Potter (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999); Sharon
Moore ed., Harry Potter, You’re the Best (New York: Griffin, 2001).
7. Philip Nel, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels (New York: Continuum, 2001),
provides a useful introduction to the early spate of reviews of the Harry Potter
novels in Ch. 3 (‘Reviews of the Novels’).
8. Andrew Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (London: Verso, 2002),
pp. 80–1.
9. Most famously, Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), had provided some early
explorations on how ‘a new electric technology . . . threatens this ancient
technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet’ (p. 82).

Chapter 3
1. Reportedly Harold Bloom (author of The Western Canon [Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1995] and a highly regarded literary critic) said on the PBS
interview programme ‘Charlie Rose’ of the Harry Potter books that:
‘I think that’s not reading because there’s nothing there to read. They’re
just an endless string of clichés. I cannot think that does anyone any
good. . . . That’s not Wind in the Willows. That’s not Through the Looking
Glass. . . . It’s just really slop.’ Quoted in Jamie Allen, ‘“Harry” and Hype’,
13 July 2000, www.CNN.com Book News. Also see Harold Bloom, ‘Can
35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes’, Wall Street Journal 11 July
2000, A26.
2. Christine Schoefer, in a critical essay on the depiction of women in the Harry
Potter books, ‘Harry Potter’s Girl Trouble’, 13 January 2000, Salon Magazine,
www.salon.com, observes: ‘I have learned that Harry Potter is a sacred cow.
Bringing up my objections has earned me other parents’ resentment – they
regard me as a heavy-handed feminist with no sense of fun who is trying to
spoil a bit of magic they have discovered.’ Similarly, Jack Zipes was report-
edly severely criticized by callers in a phone-in programme on Minnesota
Public Radio’s Midmorning for expressing scepticism about the quality of the
Harry Potter books. See ‘Not Everybody’s Wild About Harry’, 19 July 2000,
www.citypages.com
3. See ‘All Time Best-Selling Children’s Book List’, edited by Diane Roback,
Jason Britton, and compiled by Debbie Hochman Turvey, of 17 December
2001 at www.PublishersWeekly.com, and ‘International Best-Seller in 2001
List’ of 25 March 2002 at www.PublishersWeekly.com
4. ‘Property Boom Keeps Duke Top of Rich List’, www.Reuters.co.uk of 7 April,
2002. On J.K. Rowling’s earnings from the Harry Potter books see also Philip
Nel, Harry Potter Novels, pp. 71–2.

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 Notes 239

5. ‘Survey – UK Middle Market Companies: Harry Potter Wield His Magic

Wand’, Financial Times, 9 March 2001, at www.FT.com
6. Ibid.
7. Simon Bowers, ‘Bloomsbury Predicts Another Magic Year With Harry’,
Guardian Unlimited, 21 March 2002, at www.guardian.co.uk
8. Jim Milliot, ‘Profits Jump 27% in Scholastic’s Children’s Publishing Group’,
www.PublishersWeekly.com on 9 March 2001.

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9. Reported on biz.yahoo.com on 18 February 2002.
10. Reported on Guardian Unlimited (www.guardian.co.uk) on 28 February 2002.
11. Reported on www.Reuters.co.uk on 2 April 2001.
12. Reported at investor.cnet.com/investor/news on 30 January 2002.
13. ‘Mattel Reports 2002 First Quarter Results,’ 18 April 2002 at www.shareholder.
com/mattel/.
14. ‘Small-Cap Round-Up: ‘Harry Potter’ Magic Boosts Argonaut Stock’, 12 March
2002 at www.Reuters.co.uk
15. ‘Potter Creator Supports Lone Parents’, BBC News, 4 October 2000 at
www.bbc.co.uk
16. Reported in the Books section of the Sunday Times, 7 January 2001, at
www.timesonline.co.uk
17. The auction in Wiltshire story was reported, ‘Potter First Edition Nets 6000
Pounds,’ on BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk) on 15 November 2000; the other,
‘Potters Go under the Hammer’, on BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk) on 12
February 2002.
18. For example, Stephen Brown, ‘Harry Potter and the Marketing Mystery’,
Journal of Marketing 66:1, January 2002, 126–30; Stephen Brown, ‘Marketing
for Muggles’, Business Horizons 45:1, January/February 2002, 6–14; Geoff
Williams, ‘Harry Potter and . . . the Trials of Growing a Business . . . the
Rewards of Independence and Ownership’, Entrepreneur February 2001, 62–5.
Also see Ch. 2 n. 1 above.
19. See n. 3 above.
20. ‘World Wide Wizard’, The Guardian (G2) 8 November 2001, pp. 14–15.
21. ‘Harry Potter Series Tops List of Most Challenged Books for Third Year in
a Row’, January 2002 at www.ala.org/news; Emma Yates, ‘Harry Potter Tops US
“Complaint” Chart’, Guardian Unlimited, 10 January 2002 at www.guardian.
co.uk
22. ‘Harry Potter Series again Tops List of Most Challenged Books’, January
2001 at www.ala.org/news
23. Reported on www.Reuter.co.uk on 28 March 2001.
24. ‘Satanic Harry Potter Books Burnt’, BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk), 31 December
2001.
25. This was posted on www.usccb.org
26. About the banning in UK – ‘School Bans Harry Potter’, BBC News
(www.bbc.co.uk), 29 March 2000; in Australia – ‘Schools Ban Potter
“Occult” Books,’ BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk), 29 November 2001; in Canada,
‘Harry Potter Wins Round Against Canadian Muggles,’ www.CNN.com,
20 September 2000; Germany, reported on www.CNN.com on 28 November
2000; UAE – ‘Emirates Ban Potter Books’, BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk),
12 February 2002; Taiwan, ‘Harry Potter “Evil,” Says Taiwan Church’,
www.CNN.com, 15 November 2001.

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240 Notes

27. For example, Richard Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible (Camp Hill, Penn.:
Horizon, 2001); Connie Neal, What’s a Christian to Do With Harry Potter?
(Colorado Springs, Col.: WaterBrook, 2001).
28. See n. 2.
29. ‘Harry Potter “Hate-Line” Launched’, www.CNN.com, 28 December 2000.

Chapter 4

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1. My use of ‘our world’ here looks forward to the second part of this essay,
where in Chapter 11 a fuller treatment of its connotations here is given. For
the moment it could be taken to possess something of the resonance that
G.W.F. Hegel gave ‘our world, our own time’ at the end of his lectures in
The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1965), p. 442,
but in a less triumphant spirit.
2. The qualifications made here are a kind of synthesis of a range of socio-
logical and political theoretical studies. I have given my view of these mat-
ters elsewhere: in Suman Gupta, Corporate Capitalism and Political Philosophy
(London: Pluto, 2002), Ch. 1.
3. In fact, I have some qualifications to make about this, as is explained in
Chapter 6.

Chapter 5
1. From Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of
Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).
2. The quotations here are respectively from ibid., pp. 8 and 9.

Chapter 6
1. There is a large number of short biographies directed toward 9–12 year olds.
Relatively extended efforts that are targeted toward older readers include:
Sean Smith, J.K. Rowling: A Biography (London: Michael O’Mara, 2001), and
Marc Shapiro, J.K. Rowling: The Wizard behind Harry Potter (New York:
Griffin, 2000). Philip Nel, Harry Potter Novels, also begins with a well-considered
exploration of Rowling’s life so far in Ch. 1 (‘The Novelist’).
2. There is, in fact, a search engine devoted to locating and listing J.K. Rowling
interviews at www.geocities.com/aberforths_goat/. Some of these are also
listed in Nel, Harry Potter Novels, pp. 87–8.
3. Apart from almost every prize for children’s writing going, J.K. Rowling has
also received honorary degrees from the University of St. Andrews, the
University of Exeter, and Napier University in Edinburgh; been awarded an
OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in June 2000; and been elected
an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Scotland in March 2002.
4. See Ch. 3 n. 4.
5. Gustave Flaubert believed that ‘a novelist does not have a right to express his
opinion on anything whatever,’ as he wrote to George Sand on 5–6 December
1866. Quoted from his letters in George J. Becker ed., Documents of Modern
Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 95. Becker’s

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 Notes 241

book contains a range of other statements on the ideal of realism from

a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European writers.
6. In James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (St. Albans: Granada,
1964/1916), the main protagonist (the artist) says the following in expounding
a theory of art to a friend: ‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains
within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out
of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’ (pp. 194–5). T.S. Eliot, in his

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influential essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, argued that: ‘the
poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which is
only a medium and not a personality . . .’ Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1932),
pp. 19–21. Pound asserted that: ‘The arts, literature, poesy, are a science,
just as chemistry is a science. Their subject is man, mankind and the indi-
vidual.’ In ‘The Serious Artist’, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot
(London: Faber, 1954), p. 42. These (and other such) are often regarded as
manifesto statements from these most self-conscious ‘modernists’ of the
early twentieth century.
7. W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review
54, 1946, pp. 468–88.
8. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen
Heath (London: Fontana, 1977).
9. Karl Miller, Authors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), p. 164.
10. Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in
Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992),
p. 154.
11. The much admired critic Paul de Man’s controversial Le Soir essays, some of
which seemed to express sympathy with fascist views, were rediscovered in
the mid-1980s and published in Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism, 1939–1943
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). The agonies that these essays
caused de Man’s friends and like-minded critics is best gauged from the
companion collection of critical essays: Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz,
Thomas Keenan eds., Responses to Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
12. T.S. Eliot’s alleged anti-Semitism has been periodically rediscovered since
the late 1940s, and on each occasion has caused a stir among the many
admirers of his poetry and criticism. Most recently this occurred again
when Anthony Julius’s book T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) appeared, and was greeted
with a storm of impassioned reviews.
13. Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments appeared in 1995 as the memories of
a Holocaust survivor in the death-camps as a child. It later transpired that
in fact the author was not who he claimed to be and Fragments was an elab-
orately researched fiction. An account of the whole affair, including the
complete Fragments, is available in Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair:
A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. John E. Woods (London: Picador, 2001/
2000).
14. The book in question was purportedly by Rahila Khan and entitled Down
the Road, Worlds Away (London: Virago, 1987). Virago specializes in pub-
lishing writings by women. It later turned out that the writer was in fact an
English man called Toby Forward.

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242 Notes

15. Roland Barthes, ‘Novels and Children’, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers
(London: Vintage, 1972/1957), p. 50.
16. The link between Rowling’s position as a single mother and Tory doubts
about single mothers and call for family values in Britain in the early 1990s
is made in Nel, Harry Potter Novels, p. 20.

Chapter 7

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1. Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990/1978), pp. 17–18.
2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans.
Richard Howard (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1973/1970), p. 23.
3. Peter Hunt, ‘Defining Children’s Literature’, in Shiela Egoff, Gordon Stubbs,
Ralph Ashley and Wendy Sutton eds., Only Connect: Readings on Children’s
Literature, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 16–17.
4. See Ch. 1 n. 3.
5. George M. O’Har, ‘Magic in the Machine Age’, Technology and Culture 41:4,
2000, pp. 862–3.
6. Roni Natov, ‘Harry Potter and the Extraordinariness of the Ordinary’,
The Lion and the Unicorn 25:2 (2001), pp. 312–13.
7. Ibid., p. 323.
8. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature
from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. x.
9. Ibid., p. 34.
10. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Sphere, 1964).
11. Zipes, Sticks and Stones, p. 48.
12. Ibid., pp. 36–7.
13. The paradox of seeing the inviolability of one-dimensional thinking on the
one hand, and feeling called upon to find a method of overthrowing it
(seeing ‘a great refusal’) on the other. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional
Man, p. 13.
14. Zipes, Sticks and Stones, p. 40.
15. Ibid., p. 44.
16. Ibid., in pt. 3 of the manifesto, p. 37.
17. Ibid., p. 65.
18. Kárin Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Essentials: What is Children’s Literature? What is
Childhood?’ in Peter Hunt ed., Understanding Children’s Literature (London:
Routledge, 1999), pp. 15–29.
19. Zipes, Sticks and Stones, p. 171.
20. Ibid., p. 172.
21. Ibid., p. 183.
22. Andrew Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (London: Verso, 2002),
pp. 17–19.
23. Ibid., pp. 29–46.
24. Ibid., pp. 76–80.
25. Ibid., especially Ch. 8.
26. Ibid., Ch. 2 (‘Harry Potter and the Reinvention of the Past’) and Ch. 9
(‘Harry Potter and the Rebranding of Britain’).

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 Notes 243

27. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 1–2.
28. Ibid., p. 2.

Chapter 8
1. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 33 (see Ch. 7 n. 2).

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2. Explicitly disallowed in Todorov’s definition quoted above. In ibid., Ch. 4
(‘Poetry and Allegory’) deals with this at some length.
3. Ibid., p. 54.
4. W.R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 9.
5. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge,
1981), pp. 3–4.
6. Ibid., p. 9.
7. For example., Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy (Hassocks: Harvester,
1979); Nina Auerbach, Women and the Demon (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1982); Fred Botting, Making Monstrous (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1991); Margaret L. Carter ed., ‘Dracula’ (Ann
Arbor: UMI, 1988); W.P. Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985); Christopher Frayling, Vampyres
(London: Faber, 1991); Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London:
Routledge, 1988); Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ruth Robbins ed., Victorian Gothic
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
8. As in, for example, Jane Donawerth, Frankenstein’s Daughters (New York:
Syracuse University Press, 1997); Casey Fredricks ed., The Future of Eternity
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Gwyneth Jones, Deconstructing
the Starships (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); Damien Broderick,
Reading by Starlight (London: Routledge, 1995).
9. Even an indicative list of critical studies of the sub-categories of ‘women as
fantasy writers’ and ‘children’s fantasies’ would inevitably be so long that
I won’t even try something like notes 7 and 8 above again.
10. Lucie Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 3. Having
made this point with the help of Armitt here, I should also mention Neil
Cornwell’s The Literary Fantastic (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf,
1990), in which the genre distinctions of Todorov are approvingly re-aired;
however, insofar as the fantasy form is assessed from the perspective of
political effectiveness Cornwell too accepts the subversive qualities of the
genre to be more significant than the conservative.
11. Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
12. John Pennington, ‘From Elfland to Hogwarts, or the Aesthetic Trouble with
Harry Potter’, The Lion and the Unicorn 26:1 (2002), p. 79.
13. The book in question is Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to
Reality in Western Literature (London: Methuen, 1984).
14. Pennington, ‘From Elfland to Hogwarts’, p. 79.
15. Ibid.

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Chapter 9
1. David Jasper, The Study of Literature and Religion (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1989/1992), pp. 138–9.
2. Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996/2000), pp. x–xi.
3. See, for example, George H. Smith’s Atheism: The Case against God (Amherst

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NY: Prometheus, 1980) and Why Atheism? (Amherst NY: Prometheus, 2000);
Daniel Harbour’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism (London:
Duckworth, 2001); Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification
(Philadelphia PA: Temple University Press, 1992); Jim Herrick, Against the
Faith (Amherst NY: Prometheus, 1985).
4. The other one, which I read shortly after writing this, is Connie Neal, What’s
a Christian to Do with Harry Potter? (Colorado Springs, Col.: WaterBrook,
2001). Despite its more temperate tone than Abanes’s book, in broad structure
this fits the arguments made about Abanes’s book in this chapter.
5. Richard Abanes, Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick
(Camp Hill, Penn.: Horizon, 2001), pp. 153–4, 191–2, 195, 197–8.
6. Ibid., pp. 41–2, 137.
7. Ibid., pp. 151–2.
8. Elizabeth D. Schafer, Exploring Harry Potter (London: Ebury, 2000). For Abanes
on Schafer, see ibid., pp. 263–70.

Chapter 10
1. For Iser and Fish see Ch. 1 notes 2, 3, 4 and 5 above. Model 3 comes from
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

Chapter 11
1. Andrew Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (London: Verso, 2002).
2. Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, ‘Harry Potter’, Journal of Adolescent and
Adult Literacy 44:7, April 2001, p. 665.

Chapter 12
1. Schafer, Explaining Harry Potter, p. 6.
2. Zipes, Sticks and Stones, p. 175.

Chapter 13
1. Anne Sexton’s poetic rewritings of fairy tales appears in the collection Trans-
formations (1971) in The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
Angela Carter wrote several versions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in The Bloody
Chamber (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Angela Carter also edited The

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 Notes 245

Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1990), to which she contributed
a characteristically provocative introduction.
2. David Colbert, The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter (New York: Weatherhill,
2001); Allan Zora Kronzik and Elizabeth Kronzik, The Sorcerer’s Companion
(New York: Broadway, 2001). Schafer, Exploring Harry Potter, does this too.
3. J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Grafton, 1992), pp. 62–3.
4. Such as Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde (London: Chatto &

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Windus, 1994); Marina Warner, Managing Monsters (London: Vintage, 1994);
Steven Swann Jones, The Fairy Tale (New York: Twayne, 1995); Ruth B.
Bottingheimer, Fairy Tales and Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1986); Jack Zipes, When Dreams Come True (New York: Routledge, 1999);
Jack Zipes, Happily Ever After (New York: Routledge, 1997).
5. Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, trans. Ariadne Martin and
Richard Martin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 5.

Chapter 14
1. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), Ch. 1 and passim.
2. I have used the deliberately open-ended ‘our unconscious’ of Sigmund
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976/1953), p. 775, rather than the later clarified ‘superego’.
3. After a cursory examination of the matter this is what Philip Nel concludes
in Harry Potter Novels, pp. 42–6. Nel considers class and race together; in this
essay these are considered separately (class and servitude are the subjects of
the next chapter) because, it seems to me, their treatment in the Harry Potter
books are different.
4. Zipes, Sticks and Stones, p. 183.
5. Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, pp. 104–6.
6. Ibid., p. 108.
7. Malcolm X’s awakening to the satanic qualities of white people in The Auto-
biography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1964), Ch. 10 (‘Satan’) is an instance of this kind. Toni Morrison in Song
of Solomon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978), pp. 154–61, presents a character,
Guitar, who espouses a reverse racist ideology with terrible consequences.
8. Suman Gupta, Marxism, History and Intellectuals: Toward a Reconceptualized
Transformative Socialism (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2000), pp. 221–44.
9. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s adviser, Robert Cooper, published an article
in a Foreign Policy Centre pamphlet entitled Reordering the World in March
2002, recommending ‘a new imperialism’ in the wake of the terrorist attacks in
the US on 11 September 2001. On this see Hugo Young, ‘A New Imperialism
Cooked up over a Texan Barbecue’, in The Guardian, 2 April 2002.

Chapter 15
1. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London:
Routledge, 1995), in Ch. 4 (‘Sex and Inequality’) gives an interesting account

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246 Notes

of nineteenth-century attempts to negotiate between the commonness of

human desire (and possibility of procreation irrespective of racial background)
and the disposition towards racial discrimination.
2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1932), Ch. 15.

Chapter 16

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1. Some relatively recent arguments for and against class analysis are to be
found in such overviews of the matter as R. Breen and D. Rothman, Class
Stratification (London: Harvester, 1995), and particularly against in J. Pakulski
and M. Waters, The Death of Class (London: Sage, 1996). The latter could be
read in conjunction with the report on the ‘Symposium on Class’ in the
journal Theory and Society 25:5, 1996, which carries a statement by Pakulski
and Waters and responses to them.
2. About gender and class, see A. Pollert, ‘Gender and Class Revisited: The
Poverty of Patriarchy’, Sociology 30:4, 1996, pp. 639–59; Heidi Gottfried,
‘Beyond Patriarchy? Theorising Gender and Class’, pp. 451–68, and Wendy
Bottero, ‘Clinging to the Wreckage? Gender and the Legacy of Class’ pp. 469–
90, in Sociology 32:3, 1998; Diane Reay, ‘Rethinking Social Class: Qualitative
Perspectives on Class and Gender’, Sociology 32:2, pp. 259–75; and B. Skeggs,
Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997). About class and individual
location, see Sighard Neckel, ‘Inferiority: From Collective States to Deficient
Individuality’, The Sociological Review 44:1, 1996, pp. 17–34; Bill Martin,
‘Knowledge, Identity and the Middle Class: From Collective to Individualised
Class Formation?’, The Sociological Review 46:4, 1998, pp. 653–86; K.K. Cetina,
‘Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies’,
Theory Culture and Society 14:4, 1997, pp. 1–30. For class and social mobility,
see Kenneth Prady, ‘Class and Continuity in Social Reproduction’, The Socio-
logical Review 46:2, 1998, pp. 340–64; Mike Savage and Muriel Egerton,
‘Social Mobility, Ability and the Importance of Class Inequality’, Sociology
31:4, 1997, pp. 645–72; R.M. Blackburn and K. Prandy, ‘The Reproduction of
Social Inequality’, Sociology 31:3, pp. 491–509.
3. Karl Miller, ‘Harry and the Pot of Gold’, Raritan 20:3, Winter 2001, p. 136.
4. Blake, The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter, pp. 108–9.
5. Ibid., p. 15.
6. Zipes, Sticks and Stones.

Chapter 17
1. Christine Schoefer, ‘Harry Potter’s Girl Trouble’ (see Ch. 3 n. 2).
2. See Ch. 14 n. 4.
3. See Chris Gregory, ‘Hands Off Harry Potter!’ in Salon Magazine
(www.Salon.com), 1 March 2000. Also see letters about this in Salon Magazine
of 18 January 2000.
4. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979). Explorations of Victorian sexuality
include: Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994); Ronald Pearson, The Worm in the Bud

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 Notes 247

(Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1969); Fraser Harrison, The Dark Angel (Glasgow:

Fontana, 1977); Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalens (London: Heinemann,
1976); Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995); Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); Judith
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982); Andrew Miller and James Eli Adams eds., Sexualities in Victorian
Britain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

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Chapter 18
1. Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising: The Magic System’, Problems in Materialism
and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 178.
2. See, for instance, Jamie Allen, ‘“Harry” and Hype’, at www.CNN.com (Book
News), 13 July 2000.
3. Stephen Brown, ‘Harry Potter and the Marketing Mystery: A Review and
Critical Assessment of the Harry Potter Books’, Journal of Marketing 66:1, January
2002, p. 127.
4. The language of advertising is usefully discussed in Geoffrey N. Leach,
English in Advertising (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1966); Guy Cook,
The Discourse of Advertising (London: Routledge, 1992); Angela Goddard, The
Language of Advertising (London: Routledge, 1998); Keiko Tanaka, Advertising
Language (London: Routledge, 1999).
5. These techniques are unravelled with reference to a range of specific adver-
tisements by Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London: Marion
Boyars, 1978); Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda
(New York: W.H. Freeman, 1998).
6. Pennington, (see Ch. 8 n. 12), ‘From Elfland to Hogwarts’, p. 80.
7. Brown, ‘Harry Potter and the Marketing Mystery’, p. 129. The reference there
is to Jagdish N. Sheth, ‘The Surpluses and Shortages in Consumer Behavior
Theory and Research’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 7, Fall 1979,
pp. 414–27.

Chapter 19
1. John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 77.
2. Ibid., pp. 78–9.
3. Richard Allen, Projecting Illusions: Film Spectatorship and the Illusion of Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 82.
4. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 84–92.

Chapter 20
1. Lankshear and Knobel, ‘Harry Potter’, p. 665 (see Ch. 11 n. 2). The reference
is to Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social
Forecasting (New York: Basic, 1976).
2. Donald Cardwell, The Fontana History of Technology (London: Fontana, 1994),
p. 4.

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248 Notes

3. O’Har, ‘Magic in the Machine Age’, p. 864 (see Ch. 7 n. 5).

4. In this context also see ‘What if Quidditch, the Enchanted Sport of Wizards
and Witches Featured in the Harry Potter Books, Were Regulated by the
NCAA?’, Sports Illustrated, 21 August 2000, p. 33.

Chapter 21

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1. All references to the Harry Potter books are given in these chapters in-text,
with the differentiating phrase from the titles (as here) and page numbers.
All references are to the Bloomsbury editions.
2. On race particularly, see Elaine Ostrey, ‘Accepting Mudbloods: The Ambivalent
Social Vision of J. K. Rowling’s Fairy Tales’, in Giselle Liza Anatole (ed.), Reading
Harry Potter (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 89–102; Mikhail Lyubansky,
‘Harry Potter and the Word that Shall not be Named’, in Neil Mulholland
(ed.), The Psychology of Harry Potter (Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2006), pp. 233–48.
On gender and class, see Farah Mandelsohn, ‘Crowning the King: Harry Potter
and the Construction of Authority’, and Elisa T. Dresang, ‘Hermione Granger
and the Heritage of Gender’, both in Lana A. Whited (ed.), The Ivory Tower and
Harry Potter (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002), pp. 159–81
and 211–42; Brycchan Carey, ‘Hermione and the House-Elves: The Literary
and Historical Contexts of J. K. Rowling’s Anti-Slavery Campaign’, in Anatole
(ed.), Reading Harry Potter, pp. 103–16. On sexuality, see Tison Hugh and
David L. Wallace, ‘Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story
in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
31:3, Fall 2006, pp. 260–81; Ika Willis, ‘Keeping Promises to Queer Children:
Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts’, in Karen Helleksen and Kristina
Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2006), pp. 153–70.
3. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (abridged edition)
(London: Macmillan, 1922), chs. 66 and 67.
4. Ibid., p. 903. Frazer’s (and other ethnographers’) characterisation of ‘savage’ or
‘primitive’ cultures and minds as such has understandably been superseded,
especially in connection with his interpretation of totemism – which is
implicit in his explanation of externalised and split souls – and influentially in
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston, MA: Beacon,
1963). The quoted observation here, however, does not denigrate the ‘savage’
mind but discerns an internal rationale for totemistic practices, and in those
terms also discerns the arbitrariness of dogmatic theology. (‘Dogma’, it seems
to me, clearly suggests disapproval.)
5. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (London: Westminster,
1953). For a recent account of the debate about Christian love, see Amy Laura
Hall, ‘Love: A Kinship of Affliction and Redemption’, in Gilbert Meilaender
and William Werpehowski (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 307–21.
6. In fact, there is plenty of recent work on the Christian content of the Harry
Potter books: see e.g. Russell W. Dalton, Faith Journey Through Fantasy Land
(Minneapolis, MN: Augsberg Fortress, 2003); John Granger, Looking for God in

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 Notes 249

Harry Potter (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2004); John Killinger, God, the Devil,
and Harry Potter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004); Nancy Carpentier, The
Mystery of Harry Potter (Huntington, NC: Our Sunday Visitor, 2007).
7. Such as Roger Highfield’s The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works
(London: Headline, 2002), which both examines how far magic in the series
can be approximated or approached through science and technology, and
gives an outline of the magical antecedents of science and technology.

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8. John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and
Screen (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 4.
9. For a critical discussion, see Robin Truth Goodman, World, Class, Women:
Global Literature, Education and Feminism (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004).
For advice on using the Harry Potter books for children’s education, see e.g.
Stefan Neilson, Joe Hutton and Nora Huston, Character Education: The Leg-
acy of the Harry Potter Novels (Mountlake Terrace, WA: Vintage First Edition,
2001); Mary L. McNabb, Literacy Learning and Networked Classrooms (Newark,
NJ: International Reading Association, 2006). For use in higher education,
see Laura Baker Shearer, ‘High-Brow Harry Potter: J. K. Rowling’s Series as
College Level Literature’, in Cynthia Whitney Hallett (ed.), Scholarly Studies
in Harry Potter: Applying Academic Methods to a Popular Text (Lewiston, ME:
Edwin Mellen, 2005), pp. 199–215.
10. The characteristics of academic discourse are charted usefully in terms of
linguistic analysis of academic writing, as in books and papers by Ken
Hyland, Hedging in Scientific Research Articles (Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
1998); Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing (Harlow:
Pearson, 2000); ‘Self-citation and Self-reference: Credibility and Promotion
in Academic Publication’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science
and Technology 54:3, 2003, pp. 251–91; ‘What Do They Mean? Questions in
Academic Writing’, Text 22:4, 2002, pp. 529–58; ‘Options of Identity in Aca-
demic Writing,’ ELT Journal 56:4, October 2002, pp. 35–43; ‘Bumping into
the Reader: Addressee Features in Academic Articles’, Written Communication
18:4, Ocober 2001, pp. 549–75. Also relevant here are analyses of student
academic writing, including Roz Ivanif, Writing and Identity: The Discoursal
Construction of Identity in Academic Writing (Amsterdam: John Benjamin,
1997), and in most of the essays in Mary R. Lea and Barry Stierer (eds.), Stu-
dent Writing in Higher Education (Buckingham: Open University Press and
The Society for Research in Higher Education, 2000).
11. The relationship between academic discourse and the characterising features
of academic institutions is examined in Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler,
Academic Tribes and Territories (Buckingham; Open University Press and The
Society for Research into Higher Education, 2001; first edition 1989); Pierre
Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron and Monique de Saint Martin, Academic
Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power (1965), trans.
Richard Teese (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus,
trans. Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity, 1988; original French edition 1984);
Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001).
12. Peter Taylor-Whiffen, ‘Harry Potter and the Social Order’, The Independent
3 June 2003, p. 12.

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250 Notes

13. Anna Thompson, ‘Harry Potters on, and We Muggle through’, Times Higher
Education Supplement 19 September 2003.
14. See note 2.
15. Giselle Liza Anatole, ‘Introduction’, in Anatole (ed.) Reading Harry Potter,
p. xiv. The ‘Why Engage in this Project’ section is from pp. xiii–xvi.
16. Laura Shearer Baker, ‘High-Brow Harry Potter’.
17. Evelyn M. Perry, ‘Metaphor and MetaFantasy: Questing for Literary Inherit-

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ance in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’, in Hallett (ed.),
Scholarly Studies in Harry Potter.
18. Suman Gupta, ‘Sociological Speculations on the Professions of Children’s
Literature’, The Lion and the Unicorn 29: 3, September 2005, pp. 299–323.
19. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Outline of a General Theory of Magic (London:
Routledge, 2001; original French edition 1904).
20. Torbj ó rn Knutsen, ‘Dumbledore’s Pedagogy: Knowledge and Virtue at
Hogwarts’, in Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann (eds.), Harry Potter and
International Relations (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), p. 200.
21. Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans Robert Brain (London:
Routledge, 1972, original French publication 1904), p. 171.
22. Robin S. Rosenberg, ‘What Do Students Learn from Hogwarts Classes?’, in
Mulholland (ed.), The Psychology of Harry Potter, pp. 5–17.
23. Charles W. Kalish and Emma C. Kalish, ‘Hogwarts Academy: Common Sense
and School Magic’, in ibid., pp. 59–71.
24. Philip Nel, ‘Is There a Text in This Advertising Campaign? Literature, Market-
ing, and Harry Potter’, The Lion and the Unicorn 29:2, April 2005, p. 245.
25. Philip Nel, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels: A Reader’s Guide (New York:
Continuum, 2001).
26. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Peter Mandaville, ‘Glocal Hero: Harry Potter
Abroad’, in Nexon and Neumann (eds.), Harry Potter and International Rela-
tions, p. 46.
27. Ann Towns and Bahar Rumelili, ‘Foreign Yet Familiar: International Politics
and the Reception of Potter in Turkey and Sweden’, in ibid., pp. 61–77.
28. Maya Götz, Dafna Lemish, Amy Aidman and Heysung Moon, Media and the
Make-Belief Worlds of Children: Where Harry Potter Meets Pokémon in Disney-
land (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), pp. 185–94.
29. See e.g. Andrew Burn, ‘Potterliteracy: Cross-Media Narratives, Cultures and
Grammars’, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature 14:2, 2004, pp. 5–17;
Andrew Burn, ‘Multi-Text Magic: Harry Potter in Book, Film and Videogame’,
in Fiona M. Collins and Jeremy Ridgman (eds.), Turning the Page: Children’s
Literature in Performance and the Media (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006); Deborah
Cartnell and Imelda Whelehan, ‘Harry Potter and the Fidelity Debate’, in
Mireia Aragay (ed.), Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 37–50; Jyotsna Kapur, Coining the Capital:
Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2005); Anna Gunder, ‘Harry Ludens: Harry Potter and the
Philosopher’s Stone as a Novel and Computer Game’, HUMAN IT 7:2, 2004,
pp. 1–137. Also available etjanst.hb.se/bhs/ith/2-7/ag.pdf, accessed 1 May
2008; Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder, Frodo and Harry: Understanding Visual Media
and Its Impact on Our Lives (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003).

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Chapter 22
1. Ivan Vatahov, ‘Harry Potter Needed for EU Bid’, Sofia Echo, 21 February 2002
and 21 March 2002. www.sofiaecho.com/article/the-big-story/id_3986/catid_
29/search_1. Accessed 30 May 2008.
2. Egmont, one of Scandinavia’s leading media groups, has been operating in
Bulgaria since 1991 as the local licensee for the publishing products of major

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companies such as Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Mattel, National Geographic,
Scholastic UK. It is an established leader in children publishing in the coun-
try. www.egmontbulgaria.com/. Accessed 6 May 2008.
3. Teodora Vassileva ‘Small Wonders in Bulgaria too’ [Malki vulshebstva i v
Bulgaria], Kapital, 30, 27 July 2007.
4. Since there is hardly any official data on print circulation in Bulgaria, for
comparison Bard Publishing House representatives are quoted to have said
that neither Dan Brown’s books nor Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings have reached
almost 60,000 copies sold, 18 December 2007. curious.actualno.com/news_
139628.html. Accessed 30 May 2008.
5. Alek Popov, ‘The Bulgarian Trace in Harry Potter’ [Bulgarskata sleda v Hari
Potar], BTA – 100% Harry Potter, December 2003. www.bta.bg/site/100per/
2004/harry_potter/html/inside.htm. Accessed 6 May 2008.
6. In view of the chosen focus for our discussion, age (generation) plays a role,
since the negotiations between a communist legacy and a transitional
present are explicit mostly in the articulations of cited authors who have
first-hand experience of both, i.e. they have come of age or lived in the
years prior to 1989.
7. Popov, 2003.
8. Ibid.
9. In 2002, during the visit of the Pope to Bulgaria, the media’s major focus
was on his official remark that he personally believed Sergei Antonov was
not part of the coup.
10. For more on the ‘Bulgarian connection’ in Cold War terms, see Antonic
Savasta, ‘International Terrorism and the “Bulgarian Connection”’, Report
of 19 March 1982, Open Society Archives. files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/
text/8-10-58.shtml. Accessed 28 May 2008.
11. For a comprehensive account of the period in question, see John D. Bell (ed.),
Bulgaria in Transition: Politics, Society and Culture after Communism (Boulder
CO: Westview Press, 1998).
12. Indicative debates on the ‘phases’ of transition in Bulgaria can be found,
among other related critical essays, in the records from the discussion held
on 18 March 2003 ‘Bulgaria or the End of the Transition Paradigm?’ organ-
ised by the Razum [Reason]: Journal for Politics and Culture Theories, 1, 2003.
www.razum.org. Accessed 2 June 2008.
13. In the archives (www.cesnur.org/recens/potter_00.htm, accessed 2 June 2008)
for newspaper articles related to religion and culture for this period, there
isn’t a single reference to Viktor Krum. In the Guardian archives, Viktor Krum
is a factual reference in outlining the plot of the book.
14. Egmont Bulgaria, 13 May 2002. www.egmontbulgaria.com. Accessed 5 May
2008.

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252 Notes

15. The project was supported by the British Council between 2001 and 2003.
The major publication from it is Mila Mineva (ed.), Take it Easy: Towards a
Strategy for Representing Bulgaria (Sofia: The British Council, IPK Rodina,
2003). Some details on the project activities are available in Sofia Echo,
25 July 2002. www.sofiaecho.com/article/bulgaria-branded/id_4975/catid_5,
and 3 April 2003, www.sofiaecho.com/article/rebranding-bulgaria/id_6999/
catid_47. Accessed 30 May 2008.

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16. In the section ‘Highlights of the Brand’, the final recommendation reads as fol-
lows: ‘The final branding resource is existing Bulgarians outside Bulgaria. . . .
In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the best “Quidditch” player is a Bulgarian.
An image campaign could exploit this and other elements that coincide with
an overall prospective vision of Bulgaria for both domestic and international
consumption.’ In Mineva, Take It Easy, p. 59.
17. Alexander Levy, ‘Harry Potter Ignites Passions in Bulgaria’, Parizhki Vesti
[Paris News], 4 November 2004, Translated from French and reprinted with
the permission of LEMONDE.FR. www.parisvesti.com/?u_s=3&u_a=101&
sid= Accessed 2 May 2008.
18. Samples available in English are ‘Destination Bulgaria Promoted by Mythical
Harry Potter Team’, 11 June 2004, www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=
35708; and ‘Viktor Krum Looming as Bulgaria’s Tourism Face’, 10 March
2004, www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=32055. Accessed 2 May 2008.
19. Levy, 2004.
20. www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=32055. Accessed 2 May 2008. For
some details on Khan Krum see quotation on p. 192.
21. Levy, 2004.
22. Among others: www.potter-bg.com, and http://www.pottermania.hit.bg.
Accessed 27 May 2008.
23. Reports on the casting and forum entries can be found at life.dir.bg/stars/
2/star2831c.html, www.standartnews.com of 4 February 2004. Accessed
27 May 2008.
24. The firm conducting the casting in Sofia is Talent Partners Casting. www.
talent-partners.com/content.php?lan=EN&op=home. Accessed 4 May 2008.
25. Egmont Bulgaria. www.egmontbulgaria.com, 2 December 2005.
26. Postings between 26 November 2005 and 5 April 2006. life.dir.bg/stars/2/
star2831.html. Accessed 27 May 2008.
27. Also published in the Mickey Mouse magazine, 7, 11–17 February 2002.
www.egmontbulgaria.com. Accessed 30 April 2008.
28. Geo Milev (1895–1925), Bulgarian poet, critic and intellectual, educated in
Sofia and Leipzig, visited London after the outbreak of the First World
War. He is a key representative of literary expressionism in Bulgaria and,
among other poets and intellectuals of his time, an activist of the political
left. He was arrested and disappeared after the ultra-left bombing of
‘St Nedelya Church’ in April 1925. Later found buried in a mass, unmarked
grave.
29. Leda Mileva (1920– ), Bulgarian poet and author of children’s books. Presi-
dent of the Bulgarian Union of Translators (1979–89), translator of Russian,
English and French fiction.
30. ‘The Most Curious Facts about Harry Potter’, 11 February 2002. www.
egmontbulgaria.com. Accessed 2 May 2008.

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 Notes 253

31. Including a later interview with his great-grandmother, Leda Mileva.

Internet edition of Sega newspaper, Nablyudatel rubric, 15 July 2006.
www.segabg.com/online/article.asp?issueid=2347&sectionid=5&id=0001201.
Accessed 27 May 2008.
32. Iliyana Benina, ‘“Not in Slytherin, not in Slytherin”: Audio-Visual Translation
of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling’ [Ne v Sliderin, ne
v Sliderin: audio-vizualen prevod na Hari Potar i filosofskiyat kamuk]; Katya

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Nikolova and Sofia Angelova-Damyanova, ‘Harry Potter: Censorship and Lit-
erature Education’ [Hari Potar: tsenzurata i obuchenieto po literatura], both
in Margarita Slavova (ed.), Adaptation as a Strategy of Children’s Literature
(Plovdiv: Paissiy Hilendarski University of Plovdiv Press, 2005), pp. 206–14.
33. Ludmilla Miteva, ‘Harry Potter Goes to America: Having Fun with Fan
Works’, CD-ROM edition of Conference Proceedings: The Bulgarian Association
for American Studies, (Sofia, November 2003); Ludmilla Miteva, ‘Harry Potter
and His Fans’ [Hari Potar i negovite pochitateli] Vox Literarum 3, 2004,
pp. 26–34; Ludmilla Miteva, ‘School Space as a Product and Mediator of Cul-
ture in Children’s Literature’, in Madeleine Danova and Milena Katsarska
(eds.), (Inter)Cultural Communication. Conference volume. November 2006,
Plovdiv (Sofia: Polis Publishing, forthcoming).
34. Galina Avramova, ‘Is Harry Potter Dangerous?’ [Opasen li e Hari Potar?], Vox
Literarum 2, 2004, pp. 31–42; Ludmilla Miteva, ‘Difficult Decisions: Huck Finn
and Harry Potter’, in Madeleine Danova (ed.), The Transatlantic and the Transna-
tional in a Changing Cultural Context (Sofia: Polis Publishing, 2005), pp. 300–13.
35. Dessislava Cheshmedzhieva, ‘The Same but Other: Igor Karkaroff – a Key
Bulgarian Figure in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire’, New
Prospects Conference Proceedings, Plovdiv, 1–3 November 2003 (forthcom-
ing); Dessislava Cheshmedzhieva, ‘Some Representations of Bulgarians in
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Viktor Krum: a Bulgarian
Coming from an Imaginary Geography’, in Svetlin Stratiev and Vessela
Katsarova (eds.), Spaces, Gaps, Borders (Sofia: St Kliment Ohridski University
Press, 2006), pp. 208–16; Ludmilla Miteva, Humour in late 20th-Century British
Children’s Literature: Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchet, J. K. Rowling. Extended précis
of the PhD dissertation text defended at the Specialised Academic Board in
Literature, at the Higher Attestation Committee (Sofia, 2008), 86 pp.
36. Lidiya Denkova, The Philosopher’s Secrets of Harry Potter (An Attempt on the
Philosophy of ‘Fairy-tales’), [Filosofskite taini na Hari Potar] (Sofia, LIK, 2001);
Gergana Apostolova, ‘Are Dementors the New Guardians of the Golden
Apple’ [Dementorite li sa novite pazachi na zlatnata yabulka?], in Jubilee
Slavic Compendium [Yubileen Slavistichen Sbornik] (Blagoevgrad, 2005); Gergana
Apostolova, ‘Bad Realism and Good Fantasy in Futile Attempt at Literary
Representation in Julian Barnes’ The Porcupine and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter’,
presented at ESSE 8 Conference in London, 29 August–2 September 2006.
37. www.theninemuses.net/hp/4.html. Accessed 1 June 2008.
38. www.angelfire.com/mi3/cookarama/namemean.html. Accessed 1 June 2008.
39. Cheshmedzhieva, 2006, p. 210.
40. See Cheshmedzhieva, 2006; Miteva, 2008.
41. Cheshmedzhieva 2003.
42. Cheshmedzhieva 2006, p. 210.
43. Ibid., p. 211.

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254 Notes

44. Ludmilla Kostova, Tales of the Periphery: The Balkans in Nineteenth-century

British Writing (Veliko Turnovo: University Publishing House of St Cyril and
Methodius, 1997).
45. Ibid., and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
46. Cheshmedzhieva 2006, p. 210.
47. The allusion to the Russian Tsar Ivan Grozni and the Russian fairy-tale villain

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Koschei the Immortal has been made by Ludmilla Miteva in her PhD précis,
2008, p. 46.
48. Cheshmedzhieva, 2006, p. 213.
49. Kostova, 1997, p. 10, referred in Cheshmedzhieva, 2006, p. 213.
50. By implication, through references to Kostova’s argument in Tales of the
Periphery, 1997, and also by direct allusions to these texts.
51. Again by implication through Miteva’s 2008 reference to Ludmilla Kostova,
‘Representing “Darkest Eastern Europe”: Bulgaria in G. B. Shaw’s Arms and
the Man and Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale’, in Martin Dengerfield,
Glyn Hambrook and Ludmilla Kostova, Europe: From East to West (Varna:
PIC Publishers, 1996).
52. Apostolova, 2006.
53. Along the lines ‘imaginative geography’, discussed in Edward Said, Oriental-
ism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978),
ch. 1, esp. pp. 54–5.
54. Miteva, 2008, p. 43.
55. Denkova, The Philosopher’s Secrets of Harry Potter, 2001.
56. See notes 32 and 34.
57. By far less bellicose than their American counterparts, there were nonetheless
church representatives who publicly opposed the Harry Potter books as the
short publication in World Briefing ‘Europe: Bulgaria: Church Warning on
Harry Potter’, as The New York Times 2 March 2002 indicates.
58. Miteva, 2008.
59. Ibid., p. 46.
60. Ibid, p. 47.
61. Ibid. p. 48.
62. Ibid. p. 49.
63. On scholarly attention regarding translation into Bulgarian, there is only one
essay which comparatively analyses the proper names of the Harry Potter
books in their English, Bulgarian and Hungarian versions: Ralitsa Stefanova
‘A Glimpse at Harry Potter in Three Languages’, Literary Newspaper [Literaturen
vestnik], 27, 10 September 2003.
64. Hereafter all page references in the translations from the Bulgarian edition
are to Goblet of Fire – Hari Potar i Ogneniyat bokal, trans. Mariyana Melnishka
(Sofia: Egmont Bulgaria, 2002).

Chapter 23
1. On this, see Richard Spencer, ‘Harry Potter and the Cho Chang Mystery’,
23 December 2005. blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer/dec2005/
harrypotter.htm.

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 Notes 255

2. Jiang Wandi, ‘Wild about Harry’, Beijing Review 7 June 2007, p. 19.
3. Wang Shanshan, ‘Latest Potter Book Now in Chinese, Officially’, China Daily,
29 October 2007, p. 3. www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2007-10/29/content_
6212029.htm. Accessed 1 May 2008.
4. Described succinctly in Cheng Zhaoxiang, ‘English Departments in Chinese
Universities’, World Englishes 21:2, 2002, pp. 257–67.
5. Ma Jianguo ‘The Sixth Volume of Harry Potter is about to be Launched, the

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English Edition Has Arrived in Beijing’, www.XINHUANET.com, 15 July
2005.
6. Gillian Lathey, ‘The Travels of Harry: International Marketing and the
Translation of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Books’, The Lion and the Unicorn
29:2, 2005, pp. 141–51. Along similar lines, there is also Nancy K. Jentsch,
‘Harry Potter and the Tower of Babel: Translating the Magic’, in Gillian
Lathey (ed.), The Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader (Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters, 2006).
7. The Taiwanese and People’s Republic of China editions were produced by
different translators. Comparison of these could be a rich resource for trans-
lation studies, but I am not aware of much published academic research
that uses this resource. There is an unpublished Auckland Technology Uni-
versity Master’s dissertation which uses the Taiwanese and Chinese versions
of a Harry Potter book: Yah-Ying Elaine Shiao, Bewitched or Befogged in a
Magical World? Chinese Translations of Culture-Specific Items in a Harry Potter
Novel, May 2006. The following have been consulted for this chapter. From
the People’s Republic of China: J. K. Rowling, Hali Bote He Mofashi, trans. Su
Nong (Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House [renmin wenxue
chubanshe], 2000); J. K. Rowling, Hali Bote He Siwang Shengqi, trans. Ma
Ainong and Ma Aixin (Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 2007).
From Taiwan: J. K. Rowling. Hali Bote He Mofashi, trans. Peng Qian-wen
(Taipei: Crown Publishing, 2000).
8. Mihepu, ‘My Reason for Writing “Preliminary Analysis of the Chinese
Translation of Harry Potter 6 by the People’s Literature Publishing House”’,
2006. tieba.baidu.com/f?kz=66576189. Accessed 1 June 2008.
9. Jiang Wandi, ‘Wild about Harry’, p. 19.
10. Back-translation is usually used as a quality check in professional translat-
ing. However, its use to explicate the nuances of interlingual translation, as
here, is also fairly common. It is used for this purpose, and with a similar
awareness of its limitations, in Mona Baker, In Other Words: A Coursebook in
Translation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 8.
11. Ye Zhenning, ‘The Development and Marketing of Harry Potter in China’
[Hali Bote de zhengti kaifa he yingxiao], China Bookmerchant’s Newspaper
[Zhongguo tushu shangbao] August 2002. www.sinobook.com.cn/press/news-
detail.cfm?iCntno=284. Accessed 1 June 2008.
12. I am very grateful indeed to Zhao Baisheng, Director of the Institute of
World Literature, Peking University, for organising this. I am also grateful
to students of the Institute who helped me follow the deliberations and fol-
lowed up with explanations, particularly Wang Jiake and Wei Liping, and
to Zhang Chunguang for making a full recording of the workshop for me.
13. David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of
Electronic Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).

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256 Notes

14. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children’s Literature
from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York: Routledge, 2000); Andrew Blake,
The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter: Kid-Lit in a Globalised World (London:
Verso, 2002).
15. Ni Lishan, ‘Expedition of the Soul in the Game-Spirit of Harry Potter’ [xinling
de tanxian], Journal of Fujian Educational College [Fujian jiaoyu xueyuan xuebao],
October 2005, pp. 79–83.

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16. Huang Yunting and Liang Hongyan, ‘On the Art of the Double-World
Narrative in Fantasy Novels’ [lu muohuan xiaoshuo zhongde shuangchong
shijie], Journal of the South China University of Technology [huanan ligong
duxue xuebao] 9:6, December 2007, pp. 63–7.
17. Zhang Ying and Kong Dan, ‘Harry Potter and the Characteristics of
Contemporary Children’s Literature’ [Hali Bote yu xinshiqi ertong wenxue
de tedian], Journal of the North East University: Philosophy and Social Science
[dongbei shida xuebao], 5, 2002, pp. 95–7.
18. Jing Xiaolei, ‘Universal Potter’, Beijing Review 7 June 2007, p. 23. The survey
was conducted by Douban.com.
19. Shao Yanjun, ‘A Study of the Phenomenon of Pretty Women’s Writing: Weihui,
Mianmian, Chunshu’, Wasafiri (China Special Issue), 55, 2008, p. 14.
20. Zhang and Kong, 2002.
21. Li Nishan, 2005.
22. Xu Yurong, ‘Children’s Literature Should be Happy Literature: On the
Revelations Available from Harry Potter’ [ertong wenxue ying chengwei
kuile wenxue], Journal of Social Sciences [chengdu daxue xuebao], 4, 2006,
pp. 127–8.
23. In English the following are useful: Anne Behnke Kinney, Chinese Views
of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995); Mary Ann
Farquhar, Children’s Literature in China: From Lu Xun to Mao Zedong (Armak,
NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
24. Productions of the Cultural Revolution could be expected to be, and gener-
ally are, about as ideologically black-and-white, reductive and propagandist
as possible. The ‘revolutionary martyr’s stories’ that I go on to mention are
of that reductive mould. However, in children’s writing of this period there
are complexities that are worth keeping in mind. One of the best-known
writers at the time was Hao Ran, of whose children’s writings Farquhar
(Children’s Literature in China, p. 290) observes: ‘despite all the rhetoric, the
model writer of fictions for all audiences in China of this period ignored
overt preaching, revolutionary propaganda, and model heroes in writing
his children’s stories. His works resurrected fifties’ stories on children’s work
and play . . . but without the moral message that play was bad and work
was good.’
25. Such as, recently, Michael Brown et al. (eds.), The Rise of China (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 2000); Edward Timberlake and William Triplett II, Red Dragon
Rising (Washington: Regnery, 2002); Ted Fishman, China Inc. (New York:
Scribner, 2005); Jasper Becker, Dragon Rising (Westchester, OH: National
Geographic Society, 2006); Peter Navarro, The Coming China Wars (New Jersey:
FT Press, 2006); James Kynge, China Shakes the World (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 2007) – the titles speak for themselves.

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 Notes 257

Chapter 24
1. Tara Collins, ‘Filling the Gaps: What’s Happening in the World of Fan
Fiction’, Library Media Connection 24:4, January 2006, p. 36.
2. Henry Jenkins, ‘Everybody Loves Harry’, 21 May 2007, at Confessions of an
Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. www.henryjenkins.org/2007/
05/everybody-loves-harry.htm.

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3. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
(New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 3.
4. Linda Green, Entering Potter’s World: A Guide for Fanfiction Writers (lulu.com,
2006).
5. Jane Glaubman (ed.), Deconstructing Harry: Harry Potter Fan Fiction on the
World Wide Web (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
6. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of
Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991), p. 121.
7. Ibid., p. 144.
8. Silvio Gaggi, From Text to Hypertext: Decentring the Subject in Fiction, Film, the
Visual Arts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 106.
9. Ibid., p. 122.
10. Clinton D. Lanier Jr and Hope Jensen Schau, ‘Culture and Co-Creation:
Exploring Consumers’ Inspirations and Aspirations for Writing and Posting
On-Line Fan Fiction’, in Russell W. Belk and John F. Sherry (eds.), Consumer
Culture Theory (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), p. 324.
11. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 205.
12. Ibid., pp. 240–60.
13. Cornel Sandross, ‘One-Dimensional Fan: Toward an Aesthetic of Fan Texts’,
American Behavioral Scientist 48:7, March 2005, p. 835. ‘One-dimensionality’
here refers to Herbert Marcuse’s phrase, which captures the notion that in
advanced capitalist society all oppositional positions and agents tend to get
co-opted within capitalism, in One Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon,
1964).
14. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, ‘Introduction: Work in Progress’, in
Hellekson and Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the
Internet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), p. 7.
15. In the context of recent reconceptualisations of ‘world literature’, the notion
of ‘distanced reading’ was controversially mooted in Franco Moretti, ‘Conjec-
tures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1, January–February 2000, pp. 54–68.
16. For a useful recent discussion of the conceptual nuances of ‘autoethno-
graphy’ in various disciplines, see James Buzard, ‘On Auto-Ethnographic
Authority’, Yale Journal of Criticism 16:1, 2003, pp. 61–91. In academic studies
on the culture of fandom ‘autoethnography’ as a mode of both putting
academic discourse into perspective and coming to grips with fan discourse
is a much discussed area – in a sustained fashion in Matt Hill, Fan Cultures
(London: Routledge, 2002), especially pp. 71–89.
17. Nancy K. Baym, ‘Talking about Soaps: Communicative Practices in a Com-
puter-Mediated Fan Culture’, in Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (eds.),
Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton,
1998), pp. 111–29; Nancy K. Baym, Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom, and Online
Community (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000).

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258 Notes

18. Henry Jenkins, ‘Why Heather Can Write: Not everything kids learn for
popular culture is bad for them, some of the best writing culture takes place
outside the classroom in online communities’, Technology Review, February
2004. http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/13473.
19. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, ch. 5.
20. Ibid., p. 178.
21. Ibid., pp. 184–5.

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22. Henry Jenkins with assistants, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:
Media Education for the 21st Century (Chicago: McArthur Foundation, 2006).
23. Ibid., pp. 32–3.
24. Rebecca W. Black, ‘Access and Affiliation: The Literacy and Composition
Practices of English-Language Learners in an Online Fanfiction Community’,
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 48:2, October 2005, pp. 118–28;
Rebecca W. Black, Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008);
Len Unsworth, E-Literature for Children: Enhancing Digital Literacy Learning
(London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 3; Dana J. Wilber, ‘iLife: Understanding and
Connecting to the Digital Literacy of Adolescents’, in Kathleen A. Hinchman
and Heather K. Sheridan-Thomas (eds.), Best Practices in Adolescent Literacy
Instruction (New York: Guildford, 2008), pp. 57–77.
25. Heather Lawver, ‘Making Progress toward Revolution’. http://www.
dprophet.com/index2.html.
26. Heather Lawver, ‘Open Letter to Parents, Teachers and Concerned Adults’.
http://www.dprophet.com/hq/openletter.html.
27. Andrea MacDonald, ‘Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction Media Fandom and
Computer Mediated Communication’, in Harris and Alexander (eds.), Theo-
rizing Fandom, p. 149.
28. Green, Entering Potter’s World, gives a list of pairings on offer and on which
websites which occupies 19 pages (pp. 25–44).
29. Marianne MacDonald, ‘Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon’, Gay
and Lesbian Review Worldwide 13:1, January–February 2006, p. 28.
30. For example, Mirna Ciciani, ‘Male Pair: Bonds and Female Desire in Fan
Slash Writing’, pp. 153–77; Shashanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins and Henry
Jenkins, ‘Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking’, pp. 9–38, in Harris and
Alexander (eds.), Theorizing Fandom.
31. Tison Hugh and David L. Wallace, ‘Heteronormative Heroism and Queering
the School Story in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series’, Children’s Literature
Association Quarterly 31:3, Fall 2006, pp. 260–81.
32. Ika Willis, ‘Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue)
at Hogwarts’, in Helleson and Busse (eds.), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities,
p. 155.
33. MacDonald, ‘Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon’, p. 30.
34. Lelia Green and Carmen Guinery, ‘Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenom-
enon’, Media/Culture 7:5, November 2004, at journal.media-culture.org.au/
0411/14.green.php.
35. Catherine Tossenberger, ‘“Oh my God, the Fanfiction!” Dumbledore’s Out-
ing and the Online Harry Potter Fandom’, Children’s Literature Association
Quarterly 33:2, Summer 2008, pp. 200–6.
36. David Smith, ‘Dumbledore was Gay, JK Tells Amazed Fans’, Observer,
21 October 2007. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/oct/21/film.books.

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 Notes 259

37. Howard W. French, ‘Chinese Market Awash in Fake Potter Books’, New York
Times, 1 August 2007. www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/world/asia/01china.
html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=books, and Op-Ed Contributors, ‘Memo to
the Dept. of Magical Copyright Enforcement’, New York Times 10 August
2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/opinion/10potter.html. The latter
carries summaries of and translated passages from eight such ‘fakes’.
38. French, ibid.

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39. Lena Henningsen, ‘Harry Potter with Chinese Characteristics: Plagiarism
between Orientalism and Occidentalism’, China Information 20:2, 2006, p. 277.
40. J. K. Luolin, Hali Bote yu baozhoulon [erroneously translated as Harry Potter
and the Leopard-Walk-Up-To-Dragon] (Hohot: Neimenggu chubanshe, 2002);
Zhang Bin, Hali Bote yu ciwawa [Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll] (Beijing:
Zhongguo mangwen chubanshe, 2002). The former was the subject of much
discussion in the western media, and there’s even a Wikipedia entry devoted
to it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon.
41. Henningsen, ‘Harry Potter with Chinese Characteristics’, p. 299.
42. Wadong Cangshu, Xiang tianshi yiyang duoluo [As Fallen as an Angel] (Beijing:
Zhonguo qingnian chubanshe, 2005); Wushan, Meihuayin [Introduction of
Plum Blossoms] (Beijing: Zhonguo qingnian chubanshe, 2005). I am grateful
to Cheng Xiao for helping me with these.
43. The ‘Publisher’s Announcement’ appears in both editions, ibid., p. 3.
44. This is traced usefully in terms of phases in Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss
and C. Lee Harrington, ‘Introduction: Why Study Fans?’ in Gray, Sandvoss
and Harrington (eds.), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World
(New York: New York University Press, 2007), pp. 1–16.
45. Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility
of Fandom’, in Lisa A. Lewis (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and
Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 64.
46. Henry Jenkins, ‘Afterword: The Future of Fandom’ in Gray, Sandvoss and
Harrington (eds.), Fandom, p. 359.
47. Matt Hill, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 29.
48. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Researching Children’s Popular
Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 145.
49. A. S. Byatt, ‘Harry Potter and the Childish Adult’, New York Times 7, July 2003.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A02E4D8113AF934A3575
4C0A9659C8B63, Jennie Bristow, ‘Harry Potter and the Meaning of Life’,
Spiked, 19 June 2003. can www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DE0C.
htm, Stephen Pollard, ‘I Worry for Harry’s Adult Readers’, Sunday Telegraph,
22 June 2003. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/
opinion/2003/06/22/do2209.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/06/22/ixop.html.
50. Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, ‘News of the Week Doesn’t
Grab Public’s Attention: Harry Potter Books Widely Anticipated’, 19 July 2007.
people-press.org/report/343/news-of-the-week-doesn’t-grab-public-attention.
51. See Nigel Reynolds, ‘Adult Fans Taking Over Harry Potter’, Daily Telegraph,
22 June 2007. www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/06/22/
nosplit/booldharry12.xml.
52. ‘Adult Readers Grow Children’s Market’, Bookseller, 16 April 2004. http://
www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-miscellaneous/4668
034-1.html.

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Index

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Abanes, Richard, Harry Potter and the Bolter, Jay David, 218
Bible, 71–4 Bradbury, Malcolm, Doctor Criminale,
Adams, Richard, 59 193
advertising, and Harry Potter books, Brave New World (Aldous Huxley),
133–40, 161 118–19
Raymond Williams on, 133, 136 Bristow, Jennie, 234
After the Death of Childhood (David Brock, Rev. John, 18
Buckingham), 211 Brown, Stephen, 134, 140
Agape and Eros (Anders Nygren), 173 Buckingham, David, After the Death of
Alexandrov, Georgi, 184 Childhood, 211
Allen, Richard, 143–4 Burke, Sean, 34–5
Anatol, Giselle, Reading Harry Potter, Burnett, Francis Hodgson, 43
178 Busse, Kristina (and Karen Hellekson),
Antonov, Sergei, 185 220
Argonaut (computer games Byatt, A. S., 234
developer), 17
Armitt, Lucie, Theorizing the Carroll, Lewis, 43
Fantastic, 61 Carter, Angela, 97
Arms and the Man (G. B. Shaw), 193 Cheshmedzhieva, Dessislava, 192–3
As Fallen as an Angel (Wadong children’s literature, 29, 42–54
Cangshu), 229–31 Harry Potter books as, 3–5, 9–13,
Auerbach, Nina, 100 14–15, 40–1, 42–54, 61–2, 75,
author, 33–9, 98 178
Rowling as, 33–4, 35, 36, 38–9 Rose on, 54
Zipes on, 45–9, 53
back-translation, 203–6 China Youth Publishing House, 209,
Barnes, Julian, The Porcupine, 193 229
Barrie J. M., Peter Pan, 54 Christie, Agatha, Hercule Poirot
Barthes, Roland, 34 books, 93
Mythologies, 38–9 class
Baudolino (Umberto Eco), 18 in Harry Potter books, 121, 122–6,
Baym, Nancy, 221 161, 167–9
Beardsley, M. C. (and W. K. Wimsatt), thinking about, 121–2
34 Collins, Tara, 217
Bender, Rev. George, 18 Confronting the Challenges of
Black, Rebecca, 222 Participatory Culture (Henry
Blake, Andrew, The Irresistible Rise of Jenkins), 222
Harry Potter, 51–2, 90, 105, 106, Convergence Culture (Henry Jenkins),
108, 125–6, 211 217–18, 221
Bloomsbury publishers, 3, 6, 16, 175 Crampton, Gertrude, Tootle, 16

274

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 Index 275

Cultural Revolution (in China), 213, Green, Lelia (and Carmen Guinery),
215–16, 256 (n.24) 227
Curtis, Richard, 17 Grisham, John, The Brethren, 18
Grossberg, Lawrence, 231
Daily Prophet website, 221–5, 233, 234 Guinery, Carmen (and Lelia Green),
De Man, Paul, 169n 227
Denkova, Lidiya, The Philosopher’s Gyurov, I., 187

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Secrets of Harry Potter, 19
Doctor Criminale (Malcolm Bradbury), Hallett, Cynthia, Scholarly Studies in
193 Harry Potter, 178
Dracula (Bram Stoker), 100, 193 Harry Potter and the Bible (Richard
Abanes), 71–4
Eco, Umberto, Baudolino, 18 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
on open and closed texts, 30–1 ( J. K. Rowling), 3–5, 36–7, 86,
education, in Harry Potter books, 121, 95–6, 99, 100–1, 103, 109, 111–14,
124–5, 178–80 115–16, 117, 120, 128–9, 137–8,
Egmont Bulgaria publishers, 184, 186 155–7, 158, 167
Eliot, T. S., 34, 169n film of, 147–8, 150
Ellis, John, 142 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
( J. K. Rowling), 167, 169, 172–3,
Fantasy (Rosemary Jackson), 58–61, 201
64–5 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
fantasy literature, 42, 55–66 ( J. K. Rowling), 3–5, 95–6, 99,
Armitt on, 61 101–3, 113, 114–15
Harry Potter books as, 41, 55–8, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
61–6, 75 ( J. K. Rowling), 169, 170–1, 179,
Jackson on, 58–61, 64–5 201
film theory, 141–5 Harry Potter and International Relations
Fish, Stanley, 6, 76, 77 (Nexon and Neumann), 181–2
Flaubert, Gustave, 34, 168n 116–17, 118, 119–20, 128–30,
Fleming, Ian, James Bond novels, 30, 137, 157, 158–60, 184, 186, 187,
93 189, 192, 193, 195, 199, 200
fluid text, 175–6 film of, 187–9
Harry Potter as, 175–6, 177, 181, 198, translation of, 196–7
206–8, 218, 233 Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk-Up-
Forward, Toby, 169n to-Dragon (J. K. Luolin), 228–9
Foucault, Michel, 131 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Frazer, James, 248 (n.4) ( J. K. Rowling), 3–5, 38, 56–7, 86,
The Golden Bough, 171, 172 94–6, 99, 100, 111, 112, 134–7,
French, Howard W., 228 155–8, 179
Freud, Sigmund, 131 film of, 16–17, 146–8, 149–50, 189
Fry, Stephen, 17 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
( J. K. Rowling), 168, 169, 201
Gaggi, Silvio, 218 Harry Potter and Porcelain Doll (Zhang
Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 131 Bin), 228–9
genre, 29, 41–2 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
fantasy as, 55–61 ( J. K. Rowling), 3–5, 38, 87–8, 95–6,
Todorov on, 41–2 99, 101, 114, 117, 137, 158, 159
Green Eggs and Ham (Dr Seuss), 16 film of, 227

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276 Index

Harry Potter books, 6–7, 8–9, 20–3, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels
24–5, 28, 29–30, 31–2, 33–4, 80–1, (Philip Nel), 181
169–70, 175 Jackson, Patrick (and Peter
advertising in, 133–40, 161 Mandaville), 181–2
allusions in, 97–8 Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy, 58–61,
author in, 36–8 64–5
bannings of, 18–20, 172, 173 James Bond novels (Ian Fleming), 30, 93

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Blake on, 51–2, 90, 105, 106, 108, Jasper, David, The Study of Literature
125–6 and Religion, 68–70
as children’s literature, 3–5, 9–13, Jenkins, Henry, 217, 219, 221–5,
14–15, 40–1, 42–54, 61–2, 75, 231–2, 233, 234
178 Confronting the Challenges of
and class, 121, 122–6, 161, 167–9 Participatory Culture, 222
economic success of, 15–17 Convergence Culture, 217–18, 221
education in, 121, 124–5, 178–80 Joyce, James, 30, 34, 169n
as fantasy literature, 41, 55–8,
61–6, 75 Kalish, Charles and Emma, 180
film versions of, 141–50, 183, Khan Krum, 187, 191–2
187–9 Kingsley, Charles, 59
as fluid text, 175–6, 177, 181, 198, Knobel, Michele (and Colin
206–8, 218, 233 Lankshear), 153–4
our world in relation to, 85–92, 95–6, Knutsen, Torbj ó rn, 179–80
98, 103–10, 118–20, 122–6, Kong Dan (and Zhang Ying), 212, 214
130–2, 133–4, 138–40, 151–64, Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film, 145
168–9, 173, 179–80, 198–200
race politics in, 101–10, 123, 160–1 Lanier, Clinton D. (and H. J. Schau), 219
and religious perspectives, 71–4, Lankshear, Colin (and Michele
171–3 Knobel), 153–4
structure of, 93–6 Lathey, Gillian, 201
translations of, 17–18, 183, 196–7, Lawver, Heather, 221–3, 224
200–8 L’Engle, Madeleine, 43
Hellekson, Karen (and Kristina Busse), Lewis, C. S., 43, 59, 60
220 Li Nishan, 212, 214
Henningsen, Lena, 228–9 Liang Hongyan (and Huang Yunting),
Hercule Poirot books (Agatha 212
Christie), 93 Lord of the Rings trilogy ( J. R. R. Tolkien),
Hill, Matt, 232 217
Huang Yunting (and Liang Hongyan), Lowry, J. S., Poly Little Puppy, 16
212
Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss, 179 MacDonald, Andrea, 225
Hugh, Tison (and David L. Wallace), MacDonald, Marianne, 226
226 Maigret stories (Georges Simenon), 93
Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, Mandaville, Peter (and Patrick
118–19 Jackson), 181–2
Mao Zedong, 213
implied reader, 5–6, 7, 42–3 Marcus, Barbara, 9
Introduction of Peach Blossoms Mattel (games and toys company), 17
(Wushan), 229–31 Mauss, Marcel, 180
Iser, Wolfgang, 5–6, 76–7 and Henri Hubert, 179

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 Index 277

Media and the Make-Belief World of readers/reading

Children (Götz et al.), 182 book covers in, 3–7
Mihepu, 203 categorization according to, 29–30
Milev, Geo, 190, 252 (n.28) children as, 4, 8–13, 14, 24, 45–9,
Mileva, Leda, 190, 252 (n.29) 53–4
Miller, Karl, 34, 124 concept of implied reader, 5–6, 7
Mitchell, Claudia (and Jacqueline Eco on, 30–2

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Reid-Walsh), 233–4 social/political effects, 25–8
Miteva, Ludmilla, 194–6 theories of, 5–7, 76–81
Mitkov, Boris, 189–90 Reading Harry Potter (Giselle Anatole),
Mulholland, Neil, The Psychology of 178
Harry Potter 180 Reid-Walsh, Jacquiline (and Claudia
Mythologies (Roland Barthes), 38–9 Mitchell), 233–4
religion and literature, 67–71
Natov, Roni, 44 and Harry Potter books, 71–4, 171–3
Nel, Philip, 181 Republic (Plato), 120
J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels, Restoration comedies, 131
181 Rose, Jacqueline
Neumann, Iver (and Daniel Nexon), The Case of Peter Pan, 54
Harry Potter and International States of Fantasy, 61
Relations, 181–2 Rosenberg, Robin, 180
Nexon, Daniel (and Iver Neumann), Rowling, J. K.
Harry Potter and International as author, 8, 33–4, 35, 36, 38–9, 154,
Relations, 181–2 175, 186, 227–8, 233
NPD Group, 9–10, 20 Harry Potter and the Chamber of
Nygren, Anders, Agape and Eros, 173 Secrets, 3–5, 36–7, 86, 95–6,
99, 100–1, 103, 109, 111–14,
O’Har, George M., 43–4, 154–5 115–16, 117, 120, 128–9, 137–8,
155–7, 158, 167
Pennington, John, 62–5, 139 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,
People’s Literature Publishing House 167, 169, 172–3, 201
(Chinese publishers), 203, 207, 208 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 3–5,
Perry, Evelyn, 178 95–6, 99, 101–3, 113, 114–15,
Peter Pan ( J. M. Barrie), 54 116–17, 118, 119–20, 128–30,
Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter), 16 137, 157, 158–60, 184, 186, 187,
Plato, 171 189, 192, 193, 195, 199, 200
Republic, 120 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,
Pollard, Stephen, 234 169, 170–1, 179, 201
Poly Little Puppy ( J. S. Lowry), 16 Harry Potter and the Order of the
Pope John Paul II, 185 Phoenix, 168, 169, 201
Popov, Alek, 184–5, 194 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s
Potter, Beatrix, Peter Rabbit, 16 Stone, 3–5, 38, 56–7, 86, 94–6,
Pound, Ezra, 34, 169n 99, 100, 111, 112, 134–7, 155–8,
Propp, Vladimir, 98 179
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of
race politics Azkaban, 3–5, 38, 87–8, 95–6,
in the Harry Potter books, 101–10, 99, 101, 114, 117, 137, 158, 159
123, 160–1 as a woman writer, 38–9, 127
in our world, 103–4, 107–8, 110 Rumelili, Bahar (and Ann Towns), 182

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278 Index

Said, Edward, 193 Theory of Film (Siegfried Kracauer), 145

Sandross, Cornel, 219 Todorov, Tzvetan, on the fantastic,
Satyricon (Petronius), 131 56–8, 60, 61
Saxe-Coburg, Simeon, 183 on genre, 40–1
Schau, Hope Jensen (and Clinton D. Tolkien, J. R. R., 43, 59, 60, 97, 141
Lanier), 219 The Hobbit, 228
Schoefer, Christine, 20, 127–8, 166n Lord of the Rings trilogy, 217

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Scholarly Studies in Harry Potter Tootle (Gertrude Crampton), 16
(Cynthia Hallett), 178 Tossenberger, Catherine, 227
Scholastic publishers, 9, 16 Towns, Ann (and Bahar Rumelili),
Seuss, Dr, Green Eggs and Ham, 16 182
Sexton, Anne, 97
Shafer, Elizabeth D., 74, 93 Verheugen, Guenter, 183
Shao Yanjun, 213 Virden, Craig, 9
Shaw, G. B., Arms and the Man, 193
Shearer, Laura, 178 Wallace, David L. (and Tison Hugh),
Simenon, Georges, Maigret stories, 93 226
Sperber, Dan (and Deirdre Wilson), 76, Wang Xiaoya, 208–9
77–8 Ward, Graham, Theology and
States of Fantasy (Jacqueline Rose), 61 Contemporary Critical Theory, 69–70
Stephen Lawrence murder case, 104 Warner Bros., 188, 189, 221, 233–4
Stevenson, Robert Lewis, 43 Whited, Lana, The Ivory Tower and
Sticks and Stones (Jack Zipes), 45–51, Harry Potter, 178
52, 93, 105, 106, 108, 127 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, 169n
Stoichkov, Hristo, 184 Williams, John, 17, 146
Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 100, 193 Williams, Raymond, on advertising,
Superman comics, 30 133, 136
Willis, Ika, 226–7
The Brethren (John Grisham), 18 Wilson, Deirdre (and Dan Sperber), 76,
The Case of Peter Pan (Jacqueline Rose), 77–8
54 Wimsatt, W. K. (and M. G. Beardsley),
The Golden Bough (James Frazer), 171, 34
172 women writers, 29
The Hobbit ( J. R. R. Tolkien), 228 Barthes on, 38–9
The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter
(Andrew Blake), 51–2, 90, 105, Xu Yurong, 214
106, 108, 125–6
The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter (Lana Yanevski, Stanislav, 188–9, 192
Whited), 178 Ye Xianlian, 203
The Philosopher’s Secrets of Harry Potter Ye Zhenning, 207
(Lidiya Denkova), 194
The Porcupine (Julian Barnes), 193 Zhang Ying (and Kong Dan), 212, 214
The Psychology of Harry Potter Zhuang Zi, 209–10
(Neil Mulholland), 180 Zipes, Jack, 6, 20, 62, 126, 166n
The Study of Literature and Religion on children’s literature, 45–9, 53
(David Jasper), 68–70 on Harry Potter books, 49–51, 93,
Theology and Contemporary Critical 105, 106, 108, 211
Theory (Graham Ward), 69–70 Sticks and Stones, 45–51, 52, 93, 105,
Theorizing the Fantastic (Lucie Armitt), 61 106, 108, 127

10.1057/9780230279711 - Re-Reading Harry Potter, Suman Gupta