해리포터 다들 좋아하시죠? ㅋㅋㅋ

돌아다니다가 찾은 글입니다.. 재미있길래 그냥 퍼왔어요. 대체적으로 로울링의 위선이라고나 할까, 그런 이야기와 해리포터 속의 사회주의적 문제에 대한 이야기죠. 그냥 재미로 읽으세요. J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter publishing phenomenon, is an odd mixture. On one hand she is a public supporter of the Labour party and an active campaigner for the rights of single parents, much to the distaste of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. Yet she is also an honorary member of the British Weights and Measures Association -- an organisation whose aim is to fight for the pound and pint, and calls the metric system "a political philosophy and tool". Rowling's fellow honorary members include Norris McWhirter, the faithful friend of apartheid, and Peter Hitchens, the last of Britain's Burkean Tories. Rowling's imperial bedfellows are all the odder because her Harry Potter oeuvre has a "big tent" inclusivity to it, which seems a million miles away from the world of McWhirter and Hitchens -- the books all contain prominent female characters, alongside references to ethnic groups, Harry's classmates at Hogwarts school for young magicians including children with obvious Welsh and Irish names -- Seamus Finnegan and Dean Thomas -- and slightly mangled Asian ones: Cho Chang and Parvati Patil. But these glancing references are just a veneer: the books are steeped in a nostalgic and (small "c") conservative view of Britain that fits perfectly into the John Major/George Orwell dream of cricket on the village green, warm beer and old maids cycling to communion. More than that -- more Major than Orwell -- the Harry Potter books are an attempt to recall what Peter Hitchens calls "the world we have lost", a reaction against modern living in the same way as William Hague's description of Britain as "a foreign land". Harry Potter might be a wizard, and the only one able to withstand the powers of the evil Lord Voldemort, but Harry Potter is a Tory. A paternalistic One-Nation Tory in the tradition of Harold Macmillan and Iain McLeod, perhaps, but a Tory nevertheless. For those -- and there may be some -- who haven't read the four Potter titles, the story is that young Harry is an orphan, his parents having died while he was still a baby. He was brought up by his remaining living relatives, his aunt and uncle, who, in contrast to the honest English yeomanry implied in the name Harry Potter, are called Petunia and Vernon Dursley. The Dursleys are Rowling's epitomisation of the post-war lower-middle class: crass, mean-spirited and grasping, who would not be out of place in the work of Evelyn Waugh or John Betjeman. They live in a detached house at number four, Privet Drive (Rowling must have been tempted by Acacia Avenue), in an suburb of Surrey called Little Whinging. Vernon Dursley works in white-collar middle management and supports capital punishment -- "When will they learn ... that hanging's the only way to deal with these people," Uncle Vernon observes in book three --, while Petunia is a caricature of a curtain-twitching suburban housewife: "bony and horsefaced .... She was the nosiest women in the world and spent most of her life spying on her boring, law-abiding neighbours". They would certainly have voted for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative party. True to the tradition of fairytale step-parents, the Dursleys treat Harry cruelly, regularly threatening violence or imprisonment. In the second book Harry is literally imprisoned by them when he is locked into his bedroom and bars are installed on his window. They confiscate his wizard equipment during the summer holidays he is forced to spend with them, although Harry outwits them in the third book, significantly while the family "... had gone out into the front garden to admire Uncle Vernon's new company car (in very loud voices, so the rest of the street would notice it too)". The film version of the first book includes a cute reference to the suburban car obcession of middle England: a shot of Privet Drive shows a car parked in each houses' driveway, and each exactly the same model. The Dursleys read the Daily Mail and use private health care, as revealed in book four, where Rowling tells us that "Harry had lived with the Dursleys too long not to know how touchy they were about anything even slightly out of the ordinary". The Dursleys have one child, Dudley, the same age as Harry but who is indulged like a spoilt prince by his parents. Dudley is also stupid, fat and lazy, while Harry is made to do the hard work of cleaning and gardening, in the traditional Cinderella role. For their respective birthdays, Dudley gets computer games and expensive treats, while Harry's birthday is hardly recognised: one year the Dursleys' present to him is a coathanger and a pair of second-hand socks. The Dursleys, as might be expected, are avid television watchers, with an extra television installed in the kitchen after Dudley complains "... about the long walk between the fridge and the television in the living room". Vernon Dursley is a salesman for a drill manufacturer, and the second book begins with Uncle Vernon announcing that, "This could well be the day I make the biggest deal of my career". It is also coincidentally Harry's birthday, but the Dursleys are far more excited that "a rich builder and his wife were coming to dinner and Uncle Vernon was hoping to get a huge order from him." The scene where Vernon explains how the dinner party will run is a satire of petit bourgeois pretension: 'Now, we should aim to get in a few good compliments at dinner. Petunia, any ideas?' 'Vernon tells me you're a wonderful golfer, Mr Mason ... do tell me where you bought your dress, Mrs Mason ...' Anticipating the order and the large commission it will bring, Uncle Vernon sums up the limits of his ambitions: "We'll be shopping for a holiday home in Majorca this time tomorrow." Not Umbria or Provence, the Dursleys' holiday ideal is Majorca, with its lower-middle class attractions. Harry is banished to his room for the dinner. But, as punishment to the Dursleys for neglecting Harry's birthday, the plot disrupts the evening: "You've just ruined the punchline of my Japanese-golfer joke," rages Uncle Vernon. Later Harry overhears his uncle saying,"...tell Petunia that funny story about those American plumbers, Mr Mason". Both hosts and guests are plainly boors, trading crass jokes about Japanese golfers and American plumbers. In the first book the Dursleys are delighted to get Dudley into a minor public school called Smeltings -- thanks to the old school tie, as his father went there, rather than stupid Dudley's academic ability. All the readers ever learn about Smeltings is that the boys are well fed -- although the school later orders Dudley on a diet. The cruel Dursleys plan to send Harry to the local comprehensive. Instead, at the age of eleven -- a reference to the eleven-plus examination to get entrance to grammar school -- messages arrive saying that Harry has been admitted to Hogwarts school, sparing him the horror of attending a comprehensive, which are thereby classed alongside coathangers and used socks as the sort of second-best that no one really wants. The Dursleys later explain Harry's absences at school by telling others that he is at St Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys. Hogwarts itself might be a school for wizards, but in other respects it is a stereotypical English public school. It is a boarding school, a thousand years old and the only one of its type in Britain. (There are of course no wizard comprehensives, the only alternative education being a comedy correspondence course called Kwikspell). The pupils wear black gowns, and live in an ancient stone building with large grounds. The school is divided up into four houses, which compete against each other for academic and athletic prizes. Meals are served by servants in the Great Hall, the food is hearty, the masters and mistresses are eccentric, with stock characters taken from the Rugby school of Tom Brown's Schooldays: the wise headmaster -- Dumbledore, filling in for Arnold -- and the embittered and vindictive teacher, in this case Professor Snape, who was a schoolboy rival of Harry's father and particularly dislikes Harry. There are nasty bullies -- Draco Malfoy, as the Flashman character --, swots, sneaks and weeds: the standard cast of the public school genre. Like Eton and its peculiar Wall Game, Hogwarts has its own bizarre sport in Quidditch, with inexplicable rules (a sort of combination of polo, cricket and rugby, on broomsticks). The long descriptions of inter-house Quidditch games are similar in plot development as the football matches in Tom Brown's Schooldays. Just how similar Hogwarts is to an archetype of a public school comes in a comment in the second book by Justin Finch-Fletchley, who tells Harry: "My name was down for Eton, you know, I can't tell you how glad I am I came here instead. Of course, mother was slightly disappointed...." There is one difference, in that Hogwarts accepts girls, and the books give the appearance of inclusivity. Three girls are in the seven members of Harry's house Quidditch team, one of Harry's best friends is a girl, Hermione, and many of the teachers are witches. But aside from Hermione, all the principle characters are male. Even Hermione's character is a stereotype: the hard working middle-class swot, who spends most of her time in the library and reading books, and talks Harry out of taking risks: her parents are dentists. And it is the female students who are easily taken in by the most palpably ridiculous teachers: Gilderoy Lockhart (a wizard double for Robert Kilroy-Silk) the vain and egocentric teacher who turns out to be a coward and a liar in the second book, and Sybill Trelawney, the tea leaf-reading divination teacher who has only made two correct prophesies in her career. The only times Harry competes against women as equals in the four books -- Cho Chang on the Quidditch pitch, and Fleur Delacour in the Triwizard Tournament -- he defeats them both. More significantly, all of the central evil characters in the books are male, while all of the senior authority figures are male. The core of the class system that runs through the Potter books is in the facts of admission to the school. Hogwarts' pupils -- unlike Smeltings' -- are selected entirely on the basis of ability: the wizards instinctively "know" which children are capable of performing magic. This is an innate ability -- some children come from non-magical families, others are half-breed. Those from full-blooded wizard families are more likely to be able to do magic, although not all can. Blood and family descent are a key part of the plots throughout the series. Non-magic users -- ordinary humans -- are called Muggles, although wizards from Muggle parents are also pejoratively called "mudbloods" -- dirty blood, explains Rowling -- although the word is such an insult that it starts fights. Within the wizard world there is class system based on parentage, like an aristocracy. The pure-blooded wizards tend to be wealthier and more elitist. The very oldest ones have castles and indentured servants, and foreign sounding names that gesture towards the post-Conquest Norman aristocrats, such as Draco Malfoy, Harry's schoolboy rival. Even the founding of Hogwarts led to a rift between three of the founders and the fourth, the particularly foreign-sounding Salazar Slytherin, who wanted to restrict it to pure-bred wizards, and thought those with Muggle blood were unworthy to study magic. (This leads to the major plot development of the second book.) Draco's father, Lucius Malfoy, frequently expresses the view that those with Muggle blood are "not to be trusted" -- although he is one of the most devious characters in the books. The evil villain of the four books, Lord Voldemort (another name with a hint of Norman French) also felt very strongly about non-wizard blood, in an exclusively aristocratic way. He himself is only half-blooded, according to his appearance in the second book, though his wizard line is directly descended from the aristocratic Salazar Slytherin. But as a character in the second book observes: "Most wizards these days are half-blooded anyway. If we hadn't married Muggles we'd've [sic] died out" -- which makes wizardry similar to a royal family line. The character is Harry's best friend, Ron Weasley, who happens to be a pure-bred wizard. Unlike other untainted families, the Weasley family is not rich -- the wealthy aristocrat Draco Malfoy often taunts Ron with how poor he is. But while the Weasleys might not be wealthy, they still represent an recognisable aristocratic type, in this case a declining old Anglo-Catholic family. There's little doubt the Weasleys are the book's surrogate Catholics: they have seven children, all with bright red hair. The Weasley house is a tumbledown sort of small farm, although Mr Weasley works (in a gentlemanly profession: a senior civil servant with the Ministry of Magic in the wizard government), which is some sort of idealised family small-holding. The operation of the government that Mr Weasley works for is hard to understand. There is a powerful executive (the Ministry), but there are no signs of a legislature or elections, although references are made to bills and acts being passed. There is a Minister of Magic, although how he -- and it is a he -- is selected is not mentioned. The Ministry seems to fulfil all aspects of wizard government, although extrapolating from a few references (the Minister of Magic informs the Muggle prime minister when a particularly brutal evil wizard escapes from prison) and the way the rest of the Muggle and wizard worlds interact, the Minister of Magic may well sit in the cabinet alongside the rest of the UK government, as if connected through some sort of magical House of Lords. The theme of all four books is the attempts by Lord Voldemort to regain his power. Voldemort is an Oswald Mosley-Darth Vader type figure, a wizard who went over to the "dark side". Voldemort launched an unspecified coup attempt before the start of the first book: it was he who murdered Harry's parents. He also attempted to kill the infant Harry but was unable to, and as a result lost his powers and was defeated. Although the climax of each book sees Harry thwarting an attempt by Voldemort or his supporters to either kill him or resurrect Voldemort, by the fourth book Voldemort has once again regained full strength (in fact, he is even stronger). But quite what Voldemort and his supporters want to achieve is unclear. On one level there is a Nietzschean demand for power owing to the strong. But what Voldemort wants to do with that power, and why his reign is feared, is never made plain, although Voldemort does say in book four his original goal was immortality -- his supporters are nicknamed Death Eaters -- but without explaining how his coup would bring that about. Another element is in the treatment of Muggles: Voldemort and cohorts are happy to murder and torture Muggles, and exploit the power of magic over them, whereas the existing wizard government has strict rules about the use of magic and takes great pains to conceal it from non-wizards. Another element is in the purification of the wizard race, by removing the "mudbloods". In this combination of blood and power, Voldemort most resembles the Muggle world's Adolf Hitler. But if what Voldemort is fighting for is hard to understand, what Harry Potter and allies are fighting to defend is even harder to determine. The French newspaper Lib&eacute;ration has published a Marxist-structuralist critique of the Potter books, with philosopher Pierre Bruno claiming that Harry represents a political allegory of the triumph of the socially ascendant petite bourgeoisie. The four houses at Hogwarts -- Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw -- are seen as competing social groups. Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are the lower orders, hard-working but stupid. Slytherin -- named after the aristocratic Salazar -- represents the propertied-classes and Gryffindor -- Harry's house -- the ascendant class of the bourgeoisie. The whole series is therefore not about the traditional struggle of Good and Evil but "the conflict between established and rising classes." There is some sense to this, in the conflict between Voldemort and his desire to purify the wizard race, against the more inclusive policies of cohabitation with Muggle-born talent. But this is too simplistic. Rowling's hostility to the petit bourgeoisie personified by the Dursleys suggests that the abilities of wizards places them in a class well above the Dursleys. And the distinguishing characteristic of the Gryffindor house is bravery -- a more noble image than the competing Dursley representation of the middle class world, with its company cars and televisions. More importantly, it is Voldemort who is reacting against the status quo acceptance of Muggle blood. The conflict between them is not between a rising middle class and a declining gentry; rather it is a civil war among a ruling class over how it treats its members, whom it admits into the ruling class, and how it treats a lower form of life, the non-magician Muggles. There is little in the way of an explicit moral code in the Potter books, although there is an attempt to suggest one in the fourth book (and results in Harry unwittingly bringing about the death of a fellow student at the hands of Voldemort). The fourth book also includes a fruitless attempt by Hermione to emancipate the "house elves", who appear to be slaves and indeed speak in a sub-Gone With The Wind southern black patois, quite similar to the irritating Jar-Jar Binks of Star Wars Episode One. Otherwise, the wizards in Rowling's books are psychologically the same as humans without magical powers. They celebrate Christmas and Easter holidays, but without any theological connection (much like the Muggle secular world). The self-imposed rules governing the use of magic are sometimes explicitly laid out, but the emphasis at Hogwarts is on raising "good" wizards with a paternalistic sense of civic responsibility. Those who support Voldemort are shown in the fourth book torturing hapless Muggles for sport. But there is no suggestion of a greater power, no God-like judgement, only the judgement of one's peers. In this the books are very up to date -- and differ from Tom Brown's Schooldays, where evangalical Christianity plays an important part in the plot. But in Rowling's books what sets wizards apart from the non-magical world is the paradox that they live in a time warp. Aside from their magical powers, their physical lives exhibit an almost complete lack of technological change. Pure bred wizards are unfamiliar with Muggle modern technology such as electricity, guns, telephones and computers (Mr Weasley remarks how ingenious Muggles are at getting around their lack of magic). Wizard lifestyles are faintly bucolic: they travel by train, they have an economic system that William Morris would have approved of, with every shop run by owner-operator artisans: there are no wizard equivalents of Tescos or W. H. Smiths chains. There is one bank, and one daily newspaper. The streets are cobbled, the roofs are thatched, but they do have plumbing -- baths, but not showers. There is a special wizard radio station, but no television. Photography is common, but movies are unheard of. Cars are unusual and restricted to a rich or powerful few, while the wealthy have live-in servants but no dishwashers. Socially, the wizard world is strongly attached to the extended family -- so strongly that it cannot conceive that Harry would not want to stay with his aunt and uncle during holidays. And, despite Rowling being a single parent and setting up a trust fund to campaign on behalf of single parent families, there is, as far as I can see, only one on view in her books. Harry of course is an orphan (with a surrogate nuclear family in the Dursleys), while Neville Longbottom (the only other pupil not with his parents) lives with his grandmother because his parents are both in an asylum. Rather worringly, the only character from a single parent family appears to be the evil Lord Voldemort, whose father rejected his mother when he discovered she was a witch and who later died giving birth to Voldemort. Voldemort's father was a Muggle noble, while his mother was a magician but low-born in the Muggle world, suggesting that Voldemort has a mixture of class prejudices in both worlds. Voldemort later murdered his father. In fact, technologically at least, the wizard world appears to have stopped somewhere around 1918. And this is significant. Those wizards not raised among modern Muggles would not feel out of place in the world of J. P. Hartley's The Go-Between. Even their currency gestures towards pre-decimal pounds, shillings and pence, although in the wizard world these become galleons (gold), sickles (silver) and knuts (bronze) -- all coins, there are no banknotes, credit cards or cheque books. This is an interesting era for Rowling to model the wizard world on, because it was of course the last time that Britain could genuinely call itself a great power. That it did not remain one is at least in part explained by the two world wars of the twentieth century. These conflicts are mirrored in the world of Harry Potter and its symbolism: the first battle against Lord Voldemort representing the first world war, the seeds within which leads to the second, even more calamitous, world war. Voldemort's hibernation after his defeat in the first bloody conflict mimics in its timespan Germany's acquiescent Wiemar interlude from Versailles in 1919 to the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. What these books represent is a memory of Britain as it was then (in Rowling's imagination, since she was born well after that time), when it still had its Empire, when sterling was on the gold standard, and when Rowling's beloved yards, ounces and acres were how much of the world was measured. Having lost that world, Rowling has tried to recreate this vision of Britain as out of reach to mortals.