The Potter books ARE Tom Brown's School days with magic. I assume, correct me if I'm wrong, is that what Joanna is objecting to is the pernicious idea that some people are better than others at different things. Thus Hermione is a super scholar of sorcery if a bit of pedant, Harry a mediocre scholar but a top ranked Quiddich player and a really good wizard, Dumbledore is great wizard, etc. If I am not mistaken, and I may be, Joanna object to the idea that some people are especially deserving or or entitled to reward, whether material or moral (like praise and honor) merely because of their skill, diligence, or accomplishments.
The Potter books are much more egalitarian in recognizing a diversity of kinds of talent and accomplishment, as the above lists indicate, and in rejecting racist appeals to purity of blood and such rubbish. Part of the appeal of Harry himself is that he's basically a fairly bright but largely intellectually uninterested jockish kid, a kind of regular guy wizard hero boy, whose extraordinariness is basically due to something that happened to him (surviving a killing curse), rather than any special merit of his own beyond courage and tenacity.
However, one might think, and maybe Joanna does, that reward and honor should be completely disconnected from talent, diligence, or accomplishment, that the good things in society should distributed based solely on need, for example -- a possible interpretation of Marx ("to each according to his need") -- or strictly equally. There is an echo of it in Homer (despite Homer being a total meritocrat): in his initial dispute with Achilles, Agamemnon snarls at the unquestionably greatest of the Greek warriors, "And if you are very strong, that is the gods' gift," by implication, it's not to your credit. This is not of course Homer's considered view and it is not Rowling's view.
Me, I'm a thoroughgoing elitist and inegalitarian. I don't think that cornering a market in skill, etc. should give anyone the right to monopolize all the good things in life, much less to pass it on to one's undeserving children. But I think that accomplishment deserves honor, contribution deserves material reward, inequality can be based on desert as well as need, and lots of other bourgeois ideology. But I never said i wasn't a bourgeois liberal.
Still, I think this is the issue Joanna is raising, have I got you right?
--- martin <mschiller at pobox.com> wrote:
> The story wears a cloak of invisibility. I'm not
> sure what you mean by
> 'There's still the meritocracy.'. From each
> according to their means
> ...?
>
> martin
>
> On Aug 22, 2007, at 2:32 PM, joanna wrote:
>
> > I've never been able to get through a Harry Potter
> book. How is it
> > subversive. To me it just looks like prep school
> with magic brew.
> > There's still the meritocracy.
> >
>
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