Harry Potter triumphs against la Dame de fer
To mark yesterday’s hugely-hyped release of the 7th and possibly final ‘Harry Potter’, Libération has a piece by Jean-Claude Milner on what, for the French intellectual, the series is really about. Illuminating.
The first section is headed Magic versus Maggie. “It has to be said that ‘Harry Potter’ is deeply political and shows England as it is today” he begins. The last five words in that sentence will always prick up my interest: how is England today?
“Reading [the series] one has the feeling that J.K. Rowling, like many cultivated English people, knows there was a real Thatcherian revolution, a catastrophe…..but [she knows also] there is something else besides globalisation, that culture is not powerless.”
Doubtless true, though I would have thought Ms Rowling would be pretty happy with globalisation, certainly she has done quite well out of it. As to Margaret Thatcher, many French people seem mesmerized by her, to a much greater extent than the British, indeed bewitched by her, seeing her shadow lurking round every corner. For M. Milner, evidence of Ms Rowling’s dislike of the Dame de Fer is that she called the ridiculous aunt in ‘Prisoner of Azkebahn’ “Marge”, which Milner takes to be a diminutive of Margaret, whereas I would guess most English ears hear Marjorie, derived from Margaret certainly, but I don’t connect the two automatically – English culture is so confusing!
In England, Milner says, there has always been an alliance between the aristocracy (Dumbledore, Harry) and the people (Hermione) against an all-powerful middle class (Uncle Vernon, Petunia), quoting Byron, Shelley, Marx and Virginia Woolf as well as “the Cambridge Five, the pro-Soviet spies of the 1950’s” to support him. “In England there has always been a current of opinion opposed to the free market.” News indeed to Libération readers, and how relieved to know they can now buy, read and discuss ‘Harry Potter’ with a clear conscience since the series is “a war machine against the thatchéro-blairiste world and the American way of life”.
Milner goes on to say that Ms Rowling’s vision of England is born out of the “Elizabethan moment”, when renaissance Europe arrived in England. (As evidence “In Dumbledore there are two “d’s”, a reference to John Dee.”) The vital element in this Rowling/Elizabethan world perceived by Milner are the classics :
“it’s as though she were saying ‘Learn Latin and Greek instead of studying marketing. You could influence the world in unexpected ways.’ ”
A deeply hidden agenda which I admit I didn’t pick up on, although a theme touched on in this blog a couple of days ago by Marie-France.
But of key importance in Rowling’s world, according to M. Milner, is……French,
“which has a very particular place in contemporary England. Members of the Royal family must learn French, principally because it is spoken in the Channel Islands which are part of the kingdom.”
It’s sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling but always fascinating to see what the French learn and retain about Britain.
“And if the tabloids so often indulge in French bashing it’s because in England French is traditionally linked both to a feudal power system and an elitist culture. It is not an accident that Professor Dumbledore is a friend of the French alchemist Nicolas Flamel nor that French is present in ‘Harry Potter’ (Voldemort, Malfoy, Griffons d’Or). It is part of the relationship a cultivated Briton, like Rowling, has with the French language.”
Strangely Milner does not pick up that the arch-enemy throughout the series, threatening the world with his perversion of Good, has adopted a French name (with an Italian-sounding henchman/snake). Nor does he mention Fleur Delacour, who, mocked by the author as well as by the reader, is somewhat closer to the tabloid stereotype of a French drama-queen and is instinctively loathed by all Rowling’s right-minded female/feminist characters. Maybe the French edition calls her something else – I’ve often wondered how the French dub Peter Sellers’ voice in the Pink Panther series. Maybe they make him speak French with a heavy English accent.
October 28th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Ah, the exhilarating spectacle of the intellectual in full pursuit of his thèse..
The French aren’t the only ones, though they may create more fatheadedly baroque examples. A few years ago, the NFT in London revived La Kermesse Héroique, and I remember one catty newspaper review condemning it as evidence of the surrender and collaboration to come in 1940 (despite the fact that it was made even before the Spanish Civil War).