What now about Hogwarts and Oz? As we have said, the Oz stories encourage us to reflect on the reality we already know and, perhaps through that reflection, to come to understand our common world better than we did before. Do the Potter stories encourage us to reflect on interesting ideas and concepts we already make use of?
In fact they can, although in ways that may not be entirely obvious. Consider, for example, Hermione’s idea that she, Ron, and Harry might “get inside the Slytherin common room and ask Malfoy a few questions without him realizing it’s us” (CS, p. 159). Ron and Harry find that idea preposterous, since they would be recognized immediately. But Hermione’s idea is that they could be changed into three of the Slytherins by drinking something called “Polyjuice Potion.”
The notion that Polyjuice Potion transforms one person into another is extremely puzzling. What would it be like for you to become the kid next door? Would the kid next door then become you? If not, would two people become simply one person? And what would that be like?
When Hermione, Ron, and Harry begin to carry out their plan, it emerges that what is about to happen is something rather different from one person’s becoming another. Hermione puts a “simple Sleeping Draught” in each of two chocolate cakes (CS, p. 213), which Crabbe and Goyle eat. While they are asleep, Ron and Harry take hair samples from them (pp. 214-15). Hermione pours the Polyjuice Potion into the glasses. She adds a hair sample from Millicent Bulstrode to one glass, a hair sample from Goyle to the second, and one from Crabbe to the third (pp. 215-16). The procedure seems to be something a little like cloning, in which a hair sample might supply the DNA for a fertilized egg. But to produce a clone of, say, Crabbe, is not to turn anything or anybody into Crabbe. It is to make a Crabbe look-alike, someone distinct from Crabbe himself who, nevertheless, looks like Crabbe. This is the outcome that is suggested when Hermione says, “And we also need to make sure the real Crabbe and Goyle can’t burst in on us while we’re interrogating [Malfoy]” (p. 213).
If the products of these transformations are supposed to be something like clones, then the question arises, ‘What knowledge and memories will they have?’ Clearly they will not be able to carry out their mission unless the person who used to be Harry still has the knowledge and memory Harry had before his transformation and the person who used to be Ron still has the knowledge and memory Ron had before his transformation. But does that mean that Polyjuice transformations just change one’s appearance without affecting one’s memory or one’s knowledge? Apparently. Then taking the potion is more like growing a skin suit that makes one resemble someone else than it is like becoming a clone of someone, let alone being actually transformed into another person.
What the Polyjuice episode brings up is a bushel of intriguing questions about personal identity, about cloning, and about disguises. It doesn’t present us with a neatly packaged puzzle, the way the autobiography of the Tinman in the Wizard of Oz does. But it gives us the materials for raising a number of fascinating and important questions. What would it be like to have drunk the Polyjuice Potion? Would it be like awakening in a hospital room with amnesia? Or would it be like awakening after your own brain had been transplanted successfully into the body of another person? Or would it be like gaining thoughts and memories you couldn’t fit together with earlier memories?
Hogwarts and Our World
There are also other ways in which the Potter stories might help us think about the world we knew before we picked up our first Potter book. For one thing, the very coordination of the wizard world with the Muggle world should invite us to think about the fact that people around us, perhaps even our own relatives or very best friends, may have, for all we know, very different belief systems from our own. Here is an analogy to bring home this point.
The psychiatrist, Ian Stevenson, has been perhaps the world’s leading researcher into evidence that people around us may seem to remember having had a previous life, perhaps only a few years ago in a town or village nearby, or perhaps a very long time ago in a faraway place. Stevenson began his researches with trips to India, where belief in reincarnation, or, as it is sometimes put, “transmigration of souls,” is relatively common. In some of the families he visited it was no big deal for a child to speak of having once lived as a member of another family, in another village.
Some of Stevenson’s most interesting cases have been Native Americans in Alaska, whose culture includes belief in reincarnation, but who have married non-Indians without any such beliefs. Thus an Indian wife, who grew up in the belief that she had already lived another life, might marry someone with no such belief—indeed, someone who would think it totally weird to believe he had had a previous life. The Native American wife might never share her belief in having had a previous life with her husband for fear he would think she was crazy. And thus, unknown to him, her belief system would be very, very different from his.
Many people in our (real!) world believe in ghosts, poltergeists, UFOs, aliens from other planets, and paranormal phenomena of all sorts. The Harry Potter stories should remind us that the person sitting next to us in a train station or airline terminal may have a very different belief system from our own. For all we know, the person in the next seat may expect to be met at her destination by a space alien, though she would never admit this fact to a total stranger, or perhaps even to her best friend!
Seeing but Not Noticing
Here is another way in which the Potter stories may help us think about what we take reality to be. Harry Potter sometimes wonders how Muggles can fail to notice the magical happenings that, it would seem, ought to be observable to them as well as to him. The explanation, apparently, is that Muggles are, in general, very unobservant. What they see and hear is pretty much restricted to what they have become accustomed to think they will see and hear. Whatever falls outside this sphere of expectation is easily dismissed as illusion or even hallucination. Thus when Harry is suddenly picked up by the Knight Bus near the beginning of Prisoner of Azkaban, he asks Stan, the bus conductor, “How come the Muggles don’t hear the bus?”
“Them!” said Stan contemptuously. “Don’ listen properly, do they? Don’ look properly either. Never notice nuffink, they don’.” (PA, p. 36)
Have you ever seen something that you might have counted as evidence of the landing of an Unidentified Flying Object of some sort—if you believed in, say, space ships from other planets ? Many people have. But we promptly dismiss the evidence, since we don’t believe such things visit the earth.
Should we pay more attention to the odd experiences we have, the ones we cannot integrate easily into our accepted view of what is real and what is not? Perhaps. But at least this much is clear. We should know that what we see and what we hear is shaped by what we expect to see and hear. And what we count as real is heavily influenced by what we have been socialized to count as real. The Harry Potter stories underscore this point.
Science and Alchemy
Here is a final point, something we already touched on briefly. The curriculum at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry “normalizes” what we might otherwise call “paranormal phenomena” by including among school subjects such topics as spells, the history of magic, magic theory, potions, and transfigurations. The natural assumption is that any subject that can be taught to students in such a way that their competence in this subject can be tested by examination is a science. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that students at Hogwarts are made to buy textbooks in their (paranormal) academic subjects and by the idea that more advanced research in these fields can be carried out in the school library. It is further reinforced by the various attempts to demonstrate the magical skills, the theory of which is taught in the classroom and the comprehension of which is tested by examination.
An analogy can be found in the present-day attempts to integrate the treatments and remedies of Chinese medicine into the Western practice of medicine. One reason that Western doctors are less likely to disregard Chinese medi
cine today than they were a few years ago is that some of them have actually gone to China for medical training, to study the science of herbs, acupuncture, and so on. Another is that they have seen for themselves some of the success of Chinese practice, results that, in some cases, they have been able to reproduce in a Western setting. Yet another reason is that they have begun to try to understand the theory that lies behind the practice of Chinese medicine. Many Western medical schools now have departments of alternative medicine where Chinese medicine is learned and taught.
The point is not that all, or even many, of the subjects studied at Hogwarts should, or even could, be incorporated into our school curricula. After all, the great Harry Potter thought experiment is, above all, something that is simply fun to read about and imagine. Nevertheless, these stories may remind us that Sir Isaac Newton, one of the chief founders of modern Western science, spent a considerable part of his life and energy studying what we dismiss today as mere “alchemy.” Some of Newton’s alchemy seems to have been quite like Hogwarts science!
Newton’s idea of gravity—the idea that lifeless bodies, without any thoughts or feelings, attract each other, even at huge distances—struck many of Newton’s contemporaries, including the great German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, as pure myth and magic. For us today, however, gravitational attraction is as real as the attraction of one human lover to another. Perhaps some day parts of Newton’s alchemy will be considered just as descriptive of reality as his physics. Who knows? In any case, we can certainly enjoy, and enjoy thinking about, the magic, witchcraft, and alchemy of the Harry Potter stories without having to take bets on the future of science.
14
Space, Time, and Magic
MICHAEL SILBERSTEIN
Where is Diagon Alley relative to the rest of London and the actual world? Where is platform nine and three-quarters? And where is Hogwarts relative to the actual world? How do wizards travel through space-time shortcuts such as those provided by Floo powder, the Knight Bus, and teleportation (Disapparating/ Apparating) via spells and Portkeys? Of course, these where and how questions go hand-in-hand.
A key philosophical question regarding any work of fantasy is where and when the fantastical realm in question is relative to the actual world of everyday experience. What spatio-temporal and causal relations do the fantasy world and its inhabitants bear to our own? For example, if the two realms are distinct then how does one travel between the fantasy world and our own? Does time “pass” in the fantasy realm at the same rate it “passes” on Earth? What is the nature of space and time in the fantasy world compared to our own? For example, does the fantasy world allow time travel, teleportation, or other extraordinary events? Is it logically and physically possible for normal humans to replicate these feats by technological (non-magical) means alone? If these things are possible in the real world—which is the concern of metaphysics—does the fantasy world contain space-time phenomena disallowed by the logical or physical laws of the actual world? Do the magical means of manipulating space and time miraculously break or bend the natural laws of the actual world or merely exploit unknown possibilities?
Where and When: The Harry Potter Universe and Our Own World
About any fantasy story, we must ask the question: Where or when is this mythical world relative to our own? For example, in the case of Tolkien’s Trilogy, Middle-earth is a forgotten and ancient period in Earth’s actual history, a period, according to the story, we now wrongly regard as mythological. By contrast, C.S. Lewis’s land of Narnia is a distinct magical realm that can be entered from our own world via certain magical portals. Narnia is a magical land with different laws where time flows at a much faster rate with respect to Earth time. Months might pass in Narnia where only minutes have passed on Earth. The world of Harry Potter is neither a faraway time in Earth’s past or future, nor a distinct magical realm, but is Earth’s present day. J.K. Rowling makes it clear that the magical world of Harry Potter and the actual world are one and the same. The best way to illustrate this is by asking where are the major “magical” places such as Diagon Alley, platform nine and three-quarters, and Hogwarts relative to “the Muggle world”?
Magical and Non-Magical Places
It would be easy to get the impression that Diagon Alley, platform nine and three-quarters, and other places described in the Harry Potter books, really are distinct magical locations because they are arrived at by secret and magical means. “He [Hagrid] tapped the wall three times with the point of his umbrella. The brick he had touched quivered—it wriggled—in the middle, a small hole appeared—it grew wider and wider—a second later they were facing an archway large enough even for Hagrid, an archway onto a cobbled street that twisted and turned out of sight” (SS, p. 71). This is the passage where Harry first learns how to access Diagon Alley via the back wall of the London pub, the Leaky Cauldron. Take Harry’s first encounter with platform nine and three-quarters. After Harry miraculously walks through the wall separating platforms nine and ten he finds himself next to the Hogwarts Express, and a sign overhead says eleven o’clock. He looks behind himself and reads another sign which says “Platform Nine and Three-Quarters” (SS, p. 117).
But upon closer inspection we find that while these places are special, they are right here on Earth:
The trouble is, about a hundred thousand wizards turn up at the World Cup, and of course, we just haven’t got a magical site big enough to accommodate them all. There are places Muggles can’t penetrate, but imagine trying to squeeze a hundred thousand wizards into Diagon Alley or platform nine and three-quarters. So we had to find a nice deserted moor, and set up as many anti-Muggle precautions as possible. (GF, p. 69)
In this passage we learn from Mr. Weasley that what makes a place “magical” is that “Muggles can’t penetrate,” not that such places are not part of our space-time continuum. We also learn that for whatever reason magical sites are small and perhaps rare.
What separates magical from non-magical places is that the latter but not the former must be heavily protected by spells in order to keep Muggles from seeing or otherwise finding them:
‘Seats a hundred thousand’ [World Cup stadium], said Mr. Weasley, spotting the awestruck look on Harry’s face. ‘Ministry task force of five hundred have been working on it all year. Muggle Repelling Charms on every inch of it. Every time Muggles have got anywhere near here all year, they’ve suddenly remembered urgent appointments and had to dash away again … bless them’. (GF, p. 96)
From this passage we learn that the World Cup stadium is not a magical place proper and therefore must be charmed to keep humans away. Additionally, Hermione tells Ron that Hogwarts itself and other schools of wizardry such as Durmstrang are also not magical places but must be protected from prying Muggle eyes by spells and enchantments (GF, pp. 66-67).
There’s ample evidence that all the other key places and creatures in the Harry Potter universe are right here on Earth as well, even dragons, as the following passage suggests: “Charlie’s in Romania studying dragons, and Bill’s in Africa doing something for Gringotts” (SS, p. 107). Indeed, even “magical places” such as platform nine and three-quarters and Diagon Alley, which require magical means to enter are right here on Earth in our space-time continuum. In both Diagon Alley and platform nine and three-quarters, wizards go “through walls” by some magical means in order to enter the hidden areas (SS, pp. 89-94). Moreover, there isn’t any suggestion—in either the books or the films—that any sort of teleportation or apparating is occurring. As we shall soon discuss, whenever any sort of apparating occurs in the Harry Potter universe it is accompanied by tell-tale signs such as the feeling of motion, strange colors, sensations, and the like. In the case of both platform nine and three-quarters and Diagon Alley, what wizards experience is continuing into another apparently connected location. Hagrid gives us further evidence for thinking that Diagon Alley is a part of this Earth.
‘Why would you be mad to try and rob Gri
ngotts?’ Harry asked.
‘Gringotts is hundreds of miles under London, see. Deep under the Underground. Yeh’d die of hunger tryin’ ter get out, even if yeh did manage ter get yer hands on summat’. (SS, p. 64)
So, Gringotts is directly under London and we know that the entrance to Gringotts is in Diagon Alley (SS, pp. 71-72). Since apparating or teleportation isn’t used to get inside, it must be that Diagon Alley and Gringotts are in the heart of London right here on Earth. But then why is it that Muggles never sense platform nine and three-quarters if it is literally part of King’s Cross station, or Diagon Alley if it is literally nestled a wall’s breadth away from the rest of that part of London? Because, as we just learned, these are “magical sites,” which are undetectable by Muggles.
Consider that in the Harry Potter films one can see Earth’s sky in both of these magical places. Note also that in Chamber of Secrets—both the film and the book—there is a scene in which we see Hermione’s parents in Diagon Alley, which makes it clear that Muggles can enter magical places if they are accompanied by wizards. Also recall the scene in Chamber of Secrets where Harry and Ron miss the Hogwarts Express and end up taking the flying car to Hogwarts. The fact that on this flight they are seen by Muggles, that they can find and follow the train and tracks of the Hogwarts Express, and that they can fly directly to Hogwarts just as a normal plane would, all constitute more evidence that everything in the Harry Potter universe is part of Earth’s space-time continuum. We can only assume the reason that Muggles do not notice the Hogwarts Express is the same reason they do not see Hogwarts itself. We might well wonder why train transportation is necessary at all, given teleportation and such. The answer, as we are repeatedly told, is that for security reasons apparating is not allowed in or out of Hogwarts (PA, p. 419).
Harry Potter and Philosophy Page 21
