I’m Hooked
How I found — and why I’m staying with — Harry Potter.

By Ramesh Ponnuru
November 17-18, 2001

came to Harry Potter in the New Delhi airport. I was headed to Bangalore, and my parents had suggested I get one of the Potter books for the daughter of a friend of the family there. I ended up being stuck at the airport for 18 hours — don't ask — so I not only got Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (this was, of course, the British version), but started reading it myself to pass the time. Before I knew it, I'd finished the book. I went back to the bookstore and began flipping through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. A month later, I was finishing the fourth book in the series while flying back to the States.

I am now, obviously, hooked; I'm waiting not so much to see the movie as to read book number five when it finally comes out. Friends had told me that the series was fun for adults as well as children, but I hadn't taken them seriously. (My girlfriend still doesn't believe it.) My colleague Rick Brookhiser has since told me that he and his wife read the books to each other. Rick has excellent taste.

While I was in India, I also read a newspaper article that mentioned one Jack Zipes, a professor of German at the University of Minnesota and the author of Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children's Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. I got the book when I came back home.

Zipes attacks the Harry Potter series for being predictable and conventional while itself trotting out every cliché of the academic Left. The books are "formulaic and sexist," and moreover this view is shared by many other "specialists in children's literature." They inculcate paranoia by suggesting that evil forces lurk everywhere. They encourage conformity: Harry and his friends "do not drink, smoke, or take drugs." (Well there are those potions.) Zipes comes down on the books with the full weight of his Frankfurt school analysis and bad prose. We even get some references to Harry's "phallic wand."

Harry feels oppressed by his adoptive parents because he is different. "But is Harry really different?" asks Zipes. "He is white, Anglo-Saxon, bright, athletic, and honest. The only mark of difference he bears is a slight lightning-shaped scar on his forehead." (The ability to fly on a broomstick isn't a mark of difference, I guess.) But almost all children feel oppressed, strange, and misunderstood at some point. This, I gather, is why Harry Potter has been taken in some circles to be a symbol for gay kids. But even straight white boys can feel this way, and enjoy the idea that they have hidden powers that aren't appreciated in their daily lives. J. K. Rowling's books, in addition to being good reads, harness these feelings to a common-sense moral framework in which it is necessary for everyone to choose good over evil.

But perhaps that's the problem for some of the Harry Potter holdouts. Writes Zipes, "In a world in which we are uncertain of our roles and uncertain about our capacity to defeat evil, the Harry Potter novels arrive and inform us . . . that if we all pull together and trust one another and follow the lead of the chosen one, evil will be overcome." We all know nothing like that ever happens.

BACK TO NRO