Under the Radar:

Kinderculture in the Harry Potter Series

The recurring criticism surrounding J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular Harry Potter series regarding how she employs but barely alters pre-existing genre tropes – and I’m thinking of Jack Zipes’ now infamous claim that they are overly “conventional works of fantasy” (172) – raises questions about what her books have to say about the current moment, and how they might potentially reveal trends in what children’s books are doing, and most importantly, can do. In one of its numerous valences, the Harry Potter series has come to represent a fascinating comment on the interpellation of prematurely affluent consumers, a sort of literary magic act persuading readers to buy more books, into seeing themselves as apprentice magicians who must consume in order to experience magic. I’d like to argue today that a preoccupation with material objects and their potential to produce our consciousness – especially the material commodities of the books themselves – is one of the predominant problems in Rowling’s books, a problem I believe Rowling is noticeably addressing in both the content and structure of her books by thematizing such concerns as publishing, commerce, temptation, and knowledge.

In innumerable ways, commerce and money mindedness infiltrate every nuance of Rowling’s books. In the same way that they fiercely guarded underground caverns of Gringott’s are a central preoccupation of the first book, and the resting place of its titular object, but exists to allow the magical above-ground world of Hogwarts to function, so consumption and commerce seem to be a silent but predominant source of power in the narrative. Harry, the central protagonist, learns through his visit to Diagon Alley, through his acquisition of the latest Nimbus broom, to a growing awareness that magical abilities rest upon possession of enchanted objects, purchased or inherited, that his identity depends upon the consumptive act, and the use of the right objects. How Rowling addresses this problem is to my mind one of the books’ most interesting aspects. Rather than taking an either/or stance on the problem of consumption, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone summons two narrative voices that operate simultaneously: 1) the central moralizing and seemingly monologic voice of the narrator, as well as the numerous adults at Hogwarts; a voice that takes pleasure in demonizing the sinister Malfoy and gluttonous Dudley, both representative of different forms of affluence and privilege, and 2) the almost child-like awe of a subnarrative voice that thrills at Harry’s use of The Invisibility Cloak and all of the objects he gets to buy at Diagon Alley.

The first Harry book, in its portrayal of a growing boy gradually becoming aware of his powers, is obsessed with the potential of magic to resolve adolescent dilemmas – Zipes is especially critical of how often wands keep getting whipped out whenever there is a fight. At the same time though, the books are preoccupied with the institutional insistence that one do good with one’s powers. Rowling’s book is strikingly anticipatory in its capacity to allay parental concern about the potential misuse of witchcraft by vigorously teaching Harry about the dangers of temptation. We find in several of the book’s most important icons – the Mirror of Erised, Unicorn’s blood, the Sorcerer’s Stone – a narrative admonition that temptation is a bad exchange, it will always end in betrayal, that one never gets as much as what one loses. Unicorn’s blood and the Sorcerer’s Stone offer life, but make you half a person. And Dumbledore tells Harry about the mirror: “It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire or our hearts . . . However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away before it” (213).

However, this therapeutic and constant repetition of tantalizing images undoes the work of this chastising voice, turning Dumbledore’s wisdom into a lecture along the lines of Professor Binns, the ghost professor who doesn’t know he is dead and continues to give the same lessons anyway. Like Willy Wonka’s ‘Everlasting Gobstopper,’ a product which promises multiple levels of pleasure and sustained satisfaction, Rowling offers ‘Every Flavor Beans,’ and Invisibility Cloaks, and Marauder’s Maps, and Put Outer’s, Remeberalls, Flying Candles, Nimbus Brooms, and the golden snitch which Harry is institutionally sanctioned to pursue. In Dahl’s text, Willy Wonka offers and then chastises, encourages misbehavior and then rewards sacrifice. So too Rowling employs a master discourse to seemingly vanquish an enslaved and devious subnarrative voice by its sheer sense of dominance and morality, only to allow that subtext to work more easily and powerfully.

In their book Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood, Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe argue that the current moment has seen an unprecedented flood of materials that persuade children into the role of consumers in increasingly subtle ways. In the second of Rowling’s books, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Ron offhandedly mentions that, “Some old witch in Bath had a book that you could never stop reading! You just had to wander around with your nose in it, trying to do everything one-handed” (231). As Rowling’s books are increasingly described as magical objects that cast a spell on readers of all ages, who can’t put the book down, who enter into her world willingly, I think one way of reading the phenomenon of Harry’s popularity is the way these books entice the reader into purchase in more subtle, and in turn, effective ways, by getting under their radar. These are readers in the guise of Ginny Weasley, unsuspecting, who is passively sucked into a predatory book given to her by an adult, without realizing she has been duped.

It is tempting to see this double voice as simply a concession on Rowling’s part: a moralizing voice which appeals to parents, and an awe-like voice which appeals to children – that, after all, might explain why the books are so popular with so many different ages. But this is far too simple a configuration, and I think Rowling has something much more important at stake. The books’ consideration of the complex relationship between readers and desire – on numerous levels but especially at the level of materiality – is, I think, quite impressive. But Rowling further extends this double configuration towards significant progressive potential, and in the service of a quite powerful critique. Two domains of the books seem especially apt in this regard:

One of the ways Rowling regulates the tensions between voices is by employing the conventions of classic detective fiction. By casting Harry Potter as detective who reluctantly monitors threats to order only to vanquish them (given the events of his early years it is literally what he was born to do) Rowling seemingly erases or nearly effectively represses the more problematic aspects of the books. Harry uses his magical products, it’s argued, in the service of gaining knowledge, piecing together clues, and sniffing out trouble when adults seemingly can’t. Rowling’s telling use of the Invisibility Cloak, for instance – akin to Plato’s invisibility ring and the moral dilemmas it invokes – would seem to be a test which Harry fails, seeing as how he cannot resist using it for devious purposes. Except that its use is necessary to solving a mystery – Rowling’s book is often about the breaking of small rules as a necessary part of gathering knowledge. The classic detective tradition, distinguished by a righteous detective who renders a complex mystery into rational order, thereby casting a moral solution in response to a devious crime, has long been a site of such misdirection, as detectives such as Sherlock Holmes often work to restore property in the guise of merely solving logic puzzles.

But even this projection of order is problematized in Rowling’s narrative. Throughout the series Harry reluctantly solves a number of perplexing mysteries that seemingly involve a terrible villain, but end up pointing more abstractly back towards him. In the memorable ending to the first novel, Harry and his colleagues encounter a number of logic puzzles after descending into a trapdoor, such as a game of chess or poetic riddles. They presume that logic and reason will not only aid them in navigating their way through these obstacles, but also through the mystery hidden behind the final door. Unlike most detectives of the classic tradition, but like his hard-boiled predecessors, Harry discovers he is intimately related to the villain, mockingly revealed under a series of turban layers, as though the answer to the mystery could be simply unwrapped like an onion. This villain, however, is a dim visage, cast upon the back of a teacher he trusted. Expecting a simple solution to his detection, Harry instead discovers that adults can be, literally, two faced, that the easy stereotypes he had of the world are not so easy, especially since Snape, whom he suspected, was actually helping him.

The troublingly triple deus-ex-machina ending – that Harry is saved from Voldemort by his parents’ love, that he is saved from Quirrel/Voldemort by Dumbledore’s sudden appearance, and that the House Cup is awarded solely because of his benevolence – suggests that Harry might be saved from this damning knowledge as well, but Rowling has done something more than temporarily shift detective conventions. Like the Mirror of Erised that Harry peers into, the mystery does not project outward towards some scapegoated villain, but rather backwards onto himself, and significantly, towards larger culpable institutions such as adult authority. Christopher Routlege, in his essay “Harry Potter and the Mystery of Ordinary Life,” comments on how the theme of false accusation is rampant in Rowling’s books as the protagonists deal with defending the innocent, but the books also deal with the deeper problem, frequently evident, of whether children should confront adults with their newly found knowledge. This is thematized in Rowling’s highly charged endings, which are mixtures of entry into a Freudian Primal Scene (hidden in a dark room, demarcated by a door, hiding the replay of one’s origins); part passage into Bluebeard’s storage room (the one room he was not supposed to go into, but had to because of temptation); and part Oedipal (staged especially by the discovery of one’s own part in the mystery, and the curious piercing of eyes in the second book). Rowling’s use of detective conventions thus noticeably shifts from the classic to the hard-boiled, from single villain to abstract institutions, with progressive results.

Secondly, Jack Zipes has complained about the books’ rigidity, saying, “If you’ve read one you’ve read them all”. Similarly, Rowling has often noted in interviews that she had originally conceived her series all at once, in a burst of creativity. Zipes’ complaint and this view of an omniscient and almost omnipotent author are problematic for numerous reasons. For one, the timelessness often ascribed to her vision neglects some of the more playful meta-textual and self-referential tendencies of the books. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, for instance, employs numerous images and metaphors to comment on the previous novels popularity. These range from Harry’s apprehension about the grass-roots development of a Harry Potter fan club, his ambivalence about the obsessive fandom of Ginny Weasley and Colin Creevy, and his growing doubt about his own capacity to live up to the fame surrounding him. These are combined with two dominant iconographic figures that ask us to meditate upon the problematic nature of literary production and its potential to represent truth: Gilderoy Lockhart, a shamelessly self-promoting auto-biographer who ultimately misrepresents his adventures (he tells Harry delicately at one point when Harry discovers he is a fraud, “Books can be misleading” (297)), and Tom Riddle, a sinister presence who uses the arena of text to literally suck victims into participation in his devious agenda. And while the second novel obsessively reflects on the past, particularly in its meditation on Voldemort’s origins, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire features Rita Skeeter, a predatory tabloid reporter who feverishly awaits any tidbit of Harry’s newest experiences yet misrepresents his deeds.

The very image of Tom Riddle’s diary so prominently featured in the second book seems to knowingly summon iconography of the books as living entities, in the same way in which the presumably static photographic images are always moving in Ron Weasley’s collector cards, or the always alive protector paintings for each house ethically call out to those who wish to enter. The Harry Potter books are thus always works in progress, ritualistically and subversively reinventing themselves with every reading. One of the great pieces of advice from the second book comes from Mr. Weasley: “What have I always told you?” he tells Ginny. “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brains? (329). Rowling’s brains, her intentions, are decidedly difficult to pinpoint because, as I have suggested here, her books are shifting entities, employing dialogic voices to problematize desire and to critique the role of the child in an adult culture, especially the place of children’s literature in that adult culture. The question of what these books can say about the current moment is best illustrated in the Diary of Tom Riddle. Part e-mail session, part internet chat room, part suffocating didactic children’s primer, Tom’s diary is simultaneously predatory, and, once Harry and Ginny can see this, and once it escapes its original, rigid intentions, potentially libratory as well.