Sometimes a children’s book is just that... and French intellectuals needn’t get their knickers in a twist over dissecting Harry Potter, writes BEN MACINTYRE

POOR Harry Potter. He has survived dementors, goblins, werewolves and Lord Voldemort himself, only to run into that most cunning and baffling of foes: the French intellectual.
Last month Le Monde published an article deconstructing the works of JK Rowling and arguing, in high-flown prose, that the boy-wizard is nothing less than a capitalist oppressor, a neoliberal apostle of Anglo-Saxon social brutalism. The world of Hogwarts, wrote Ilias Yocaris, Maitre de conferences of French Literature at the Institut Universitaire de Formation de Maitres in Nice, is a “pitiless jungle”, characterised by “individualism, excessive competition and a cult of violence”.
Pas du tout, declared Isabelle Smadja, philosophy professor at the Lycee Loritz in Nancy. Responding with her own Le Monde article, she insisted that Harry is truly a creature of the Left, an anti-globalist child of Seattle, opposed to free markets, supportive of the weak and oppressed, and no doubt a drinker of ethically-produced coffee. So far from promoting capitalism, she declared, the Potter oeuvre is “a ferocious critique of consumer society and the world of free enterprise”.
It was inevitable that les intellos would eventually get round to analysing Rowling, for grown-ups have been steadily encroaching on what should be sovereign children’s territory ever since Potter first appeared in print. Almost 30 per cent of the first four Harry Potter books were bought for readers aged 35 and over.
The literary critic, Harold Bloom, dismissed Harry Potter as “goo”. He was wrong; these are brilliant, captivating children’s books. I have read every word of the series - aloud - to my children. Some books, nominally for children, are written on two levels. Alice in Wonderland is a surreal fairy tale, but also a parody on injustice; Lord of the Rings is about the corruption of power. A modern equivalent of such double-layered culture might be The Simpsons, which provides equal enjoyment to my four-year-old daughter and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Harry Potter books, however, offer little in the way of psychological or moral complexity. These are not allegories for our times, but simple, well-written tales intended to be read to or by children. By pretending that Harry Potter is adult fare we do it, and literature in general, a profound disservice.
It is a measure of Rowling’s unprecedented success that Harry Potter has become so deeply embedded in the culture that adults feel obliged to find more in the books than meets the eye. When scholars, linguists, analysts, anti-racists, Jungians, Freudians, Jungian-Freudians, sociologists, lawyers, philosophers, psychologists and literary critics start clustering around a child’s book, it is time to stop reading between the lines.
Much of the “scholarship” surrounding Harry Potter is unintentionally hilarious, virtually incomprehensible, and perfectly pointless. Yet, the phenomenon is fascinating for the way it exposes our preoccupations: adults have projected their own concerns on to these books, and the results say far more about us than about Harry Potter. Here are some categories in this weird and expanding sub-genre:
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Thatcherism: since Harry wants a gold cauldron rather than a pewter one, and always gets a fancier style of broomstick, he is an apostle of consumerism and a pro-Establishment stooge. Hogwarts, by this interpretation, is an elitist Eton of wizardry.
Harry Potter and the Revolution: faced by the Ministry of Magic’s bourgeois rules, Harry and his comrades act in defiance of a state run by a self-perpetuating elite controlling the means of producing magic. Harry has the same spectacles as Trotsky.
Harry Potter and the Feminist Backlash: there is only one major female character; she wears glasses and is a super-intelligent swot; this is an anti-woman caricature. For more on this theme, if you can stomach it, read Hermione Granger and the Heritage of Gender by Eliza Dresang.
Harry Potter and the Philosophers: he is a Nietzschean, or a Stoic, or a Nazi, or Jesus, or anyone else you like, really.
Harry Potter and the Christian Fundamentalists: witchcraft is evil. Er, that’s it. (Y’all wanna go burn someone now?)
Harry Potter and the Secret Racism: some wizards believe that they are a superior race to mere human beings, or Muggles; those of mixed blood are discriminated against as “mudbloods”. Never mind that Rowling condemns Draco Malfoy’s racism with thumping sincerity, some academic investigators have still managed to detect the racist myth of the “happy slave” in the depiction of house-elves who (with one exception) don’t want to be free, and cannot cope with freedom when they get it. Harry Potter and the European Union: a lawyer, Susan Hall, has gone to the trouble of analysing the wizard legal system in order to arrive at the conclusion that the Ministry of Magic contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.
Harry Potter and the Gobbets of Tosh: here is a direct quotation from Jungian analyst Gail Grynbaum describing Harry’s encounter with the magic mirror. “This in alchemical terms is a ‘whitening’, an albedo time of reflection...a time to experience the transformative power of Hermes-Mercury.” (No it’s not; it’s a magic mirror.)
There is much, much more of this theorising. I shall leave you to imagine the horrors of Harry Potter and anal-phase aggression.
Some children’s books are worthy of adult literature. A few even deserve textual analysis. Most are not. Some children’s books have hidden, or not so hidden, adult subtexts (Remember Little Black Sambo?). But most don’t. The endless pseudo-scholarly theorising over Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer reflects a culture that finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between childish entertainment and adult intellectual nourishment.
As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a children’s book is just for children.