Discuss:
The Enchanted Castle, by Edith Nesbit, from chapter 1:
“It is an enchanted castle,” said Kathleen.
“I don’t see any castle,” said Jimmy.
“What do you call that, then?” Gerald pointed to where, beyond a belt of lime-trees, white towers and turrets broke the the blue of the sky.
“There doesn’t seem to be anyone about,” said Kathleen, “and yet it’s all so tidy. I believe it is magic. [...] If we were in a book it would be an enchanted castle – certain to be.”
“It is an enchanted castle,” said Gerald in hollow tones.
“But there aren’t any,” Jimmy was quite positive.
“How do you know? Do you think there’s nothing in the world but what you’ve seen?” His scorn was crushing.
“I think magic went out when people began to have steam-engines,” Jimmy insisted, “and newspapers, and telephones and wireless telegraphing.”
“Wireless is rather like magic when you come to think of it,” said Gerald.
“Oh, that sort!” Jimmy’s contempt was deep.
“Perhaps there’s given up being magic because people didn’t believe in it anymore,” said Kathleen.
“Well, don’t let’s spoil the show with any silly old not believing,” said Gerald with decision. “I’m going to believe in magic as hard as I can.”
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pp. 411-12:
Hermione looked outraged.
“But that’s – I’m sorry, but that’s completely ridiculous! How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of – of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”
“Yes, you could,” said Xenophilius. “I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little.”
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m with Jimmy (pre-the discovery of the ring) and the divine Ms H. on this one.
To wit:
There is no evidence that enchanted castles exist in our world. One does, according to a quick Google of The Enchanted Castle, exist in Jimmy’s world, but since he starts out with the assumption that he’s living in our world, his mistake is not about the existence of castles but about which rules of reality apply to him. To expect him to be self-aware in 1907, when the story was written and post-modernism was not in vogue, is at best, ungenerous.
Folk in the dark ages (and some time after) used magical or supernatural explanations to explain phenomena they could not understand. The more phenomenona science explained, the less room there was for magical explanations. I am not saying, btw, that all scientific explanations are final, faultless and exceptionless. They are, however, based on empirical evidence and verifiable. Magical explanations, on the other hand, are not.
Believing in something does not make it true, Tinker Bell notwithstanding. This applies even within the confines of The Enchanted Castle The children’s belief in magic only protects them from the dark side-effects of the magic; it does not make the magic possible.
It’s difficult to prove that something doesn’t exist. It is possible to prove however, that it’s very unlikely that something exists, using statistics and probability and very good representative sampling. But to argue that something with an infinitesimal likelihood of existing has as much reality as something whose existence is supported by actual evidence is … fanciful. The divine Ms. H’s outrage reflects her profound understanding of the laws of statistics and logic.
And for those who would argue that the divine Ms. was in fact wrong because the tale of the Three Brothers did in fact refer to actual objects: there was never any evidence presented by the author that Death was involved in the inception of the three Hallows. There was never any evidence that Death could assume a shape or body, speak or have intent, or plan or plot. The story was in fact a fairy tale built around three actual objects.
BTW, I quickly scanned through The Enchanted Castle and was charmed, especially by the ending. I had two thoughts: how much was Tolkien influenced by this story? And what a marvellous ending. The best possible ending to such a tale.
–“Yes, you could,” said Xenophilius. “I am glad to see that you are opening your mind a little.”–
Is she really though? Xenophilius believes in many things that obviously are not true, and Hermoine has shown herself to believe in many ‘fanciful’ things, including magic, because of the evidence given.
Hermione spent 6 years under a cloak she refused to believe existed. Hermione was wrong. She said, quite plainly, “The Hallows can’t exist,” and, “It’s just a story.” Death’s involvement or not, the empiricist had the existence of the Hallows flat wrong.
It’s probably no surprise that I’m with Gerald (and G.K. Chesterton) on this. It seems to me little more than a bare assertion that empirical evidence is more reliable than faith in giving us truth, and anyway, you have to accept a certain definition of truth (truth is that which can be proved empirically!) to come to that conclusion. The whole thing begs the question. And empirical evidence has been proven wrong so many times.
Empirical evidence usually can’t prove anything supernatural. And even when something supernatural stares an empiricist in the face, they often deny it, because of the assumption that empirical evidence has already disproved the supernatural.
Now, an empiricist need not be this way, but the fact of the matter is, if there is supernatural involvement in the world, if humanity really is “fundamentally mythic” (Kilby), then empirical evidence, logic, rationalism, etc., are incapable of attaining this knowledge alone. Faith, myth, fairy tales, etc. are a part of grasping what it means to be human.
Kilby again, quoting Gide:
On the story itself – this is my first reading of it, and I plan to get through it in the next day or two. I’m looking forward to this ending! I’m just a chapter and a half in, and I already enjoy it far more than Five Children and It.
I’ll have to see if Tolkien references the story anywhere. I know it was a huge influence on Lewis.
Hermione did not reject the existence of invisibility cloaks – obviously she accepted there were such things. She also did not reject the existence of powerful wands. Not sure what she would have made of the resurrection stone, except to cite the truism – repeated by none less than Headless Nick – that the dead do not return.
What she rejected was that Death had given three brothers three objects which were called the Hallows. She rejected the origin story of the Hallows. And I repeat that the author did not provide any evidence that Death – or any kind of supernatural force (which is kind of ironic, given we’re talking about a fantasy story) – had been involved in the creation of the Hallows. The story was a teaching tale, within and outside the story.
Yes, empirical evidence has been proven wrong many times. And that is part of the beauty of empirical evidence. It can be proven wrong.
I am not sick of “therefore” and “since” and “because”. I live by inference and deduction. Without them, any one thing is as possible as any other thing. The world is the center of the universe and rides on the back of a gigantic turtle while Zeus hurls thunderbolts from the sky and the stars control our destiny.
Anyways, we are obviously not going to agree on this, and that’s ok. It is a lovely story, however. And it does make me want to read her other stories. And it does make me feel a teeny bit of curiousity about the Fabians, as Wikipedia tells me Nesbit and her husband were co-founders.
Yes, Nesbit and her husband were very early Fabians. I’ve got lots more exploring to do there. But I’ve learned than a few other moral-imagination thinkers also held similar politics to the Fabians (Ruskin, for example).
I am not sick of “therefore” and “since” and “because”. I live by inference and deduction. Without them, any one thing is as possible as any other thing.
Yes, precisely! Ever read chapter four of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy?
I think the conversation is worth having, despite our inevitable, and quite possibly permanent, disagreement on the matter. (Probably the same thing you think about our having the Dumbledore and the gender discussion.)
I know this isn’t precisely what you’re saying, but here’s Chesterton along these lines:
Hermione disbelieved in both the origin of the Hallows and in the Hallows themselves. She disbelieved in the Hallows themselves, because the surrounding story seemed to fanciful, and she ended up being wrong, because she disbelieved a fairy tale because it was a fairy tale. Dumbledore’s plan worked – Hermione’s overly-logical mind slowed Harry down.
The story was less than 100% factually accurate (Dumbledore also thought the part about Death’s involvement was not factually true), but more than a teaching tale – it a story about true magical items, and it communicated a true philosophy of life. Hermione was more wrong than Xenophilius on this one, I think, because the central debate that took place after the story was read was not, “Did Death give these items to the Peverell brothers,” but “Do these items even exist.”
What Travis said, & I appreciate it because it has saved me a lot of time trying to say the same thing & not say it as clearly & concisely as he did.
I also don’t think anyone denies the reality & benefit of empirical evidence or of inference & deduction, I think the argument comes to down to, is that all there is? Are those the only ways of knowing truth & reality? And I would come down on the side of, no, they’re not.
Whenever, I consider this deeply I’m always moved back to Professor Kirke’s talk with the children in the LWW or of Puddleglum’s conversation with the Green Witch in SC.
I don’t think anyone in the story (the greater story!) thought to differentiate between the origin of the items and thier actual existence, since they seemed inextricably linked. However, do you really believe that Hermione rejected the existence of either invisibility cloaks or powerful wands? I don’t think so. She rejected the fairy tale origin of the objects. As for Xenophilius, we don’t know enough about his thinking to know how much he could swallow wholesale. Did he believe Death made a bargain with three wizards? Or did he just believe the three Hallows existed, whatever their provenance.
For me, Hermione’s disbelief is in the nature of a plot device. She rejects the potential existence of the Hallows because JKR needs someone to express incredulity that such objects exist so as to lend them with the aura of the supernatural. I would also like to point out – again – that there is no evidence offered by the author that these objects are in fact supernatural, whatever that term may mean in a fantasy tale.
I also think that in the ambivalent stance JKR takes towards the supernatural in her story, the Hallows can be interpreted as either naturally (!?) magical objects which are arbitrarily assigned supernatural powers by characters in the story, or as “truly” supernatural objects. And I think that the burden of the evidence is that their magic is natural.
This is not, for me, a rejection of the reality of King’s Cross. Harry dies and goes for a time a little bit past the veil, has a conversation, and comes back. He comes back because he gave his life willingly. Love, sacrifice, death, and resurrection. It is a deeper or older magic than the magic of wands and cloaks and even resurrection stones.
On another matter: I think it’s quite possible that you (Travis) and I can see eye to eye on Dumbledore. Well, perhaps not quite that, but I think we do see each other’s perspectives. Harry as Cinderfella, on the other hand, not so much. But I do need to do a bit more reading on that before I can debate it with you.
Re the Nesbit-Tolkien connection:
There has been some recent speculation among Tolkien scholars as to whether Bilbo’s invisibility ring was influenced by the ring in The Enchanted Castle. In favor is the fact that we know Tolkien read other Nesbit books and spoke well of them; he called her “an author I delight in” in one (unpublished) letter and wrote about the “triumphant formula that E. Nesbit found in the Amulet and The Phoenix and the Carpet in drafts for “On Fairy Stories”. We know that The Five Children and It influenced his novel Roverandom; the “sand-sorceror” Psamathos Psamathides is clearly based on Nesbit’s Psammead. Also the scene where the ring made Mabel invisible, but not her shadow, is very Tolkien-like; and according to recent research by John D. Rateliff, there aren’t really very many examples of invisibility rings prior to Tolkien. But hard evidence is lacking, since no one knows whether Tolkien read The Enchanted Castle (he would have been 14 or 15 when it was published). The following URLs discuss the matter further (note my comment in the first):
http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2008/09/sixth-ring_18.html
http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2008/09/seventh-ring.html
http://mysite.verizon.net/wghammond/addenda/guide_by_date.html
Thanks, Steve, for the info and the links.
As I noted, I only scanned the story and read the end. But from what I could see, the ring was not only an invisibility ring, but a ring of power with some curious and dark attributes. The way the story ended (which I will not reveal for those who have not read it yet) also had some echoes of LOTR – a much less destructive solution than the one found at Mt. Doom, but a pretty definitive one nonetheless. All of which makes me wonder if Bilbo’s ring is Nesbit’s ring, grown up.
Today’s culture (at least in America) values rational thinking alone as a way to gain knowledge and discover truth. Those like Travis who want to argue in favor of mythical thinking often come across as irrational and anti-reason, which I do not think is the case. Traditionally, human beings have found rational thinking to be useful for some things (building ships and bridges, making medicine, traveling to the moon, etc.) and mythical thinking to be useful for other things (dealing with death, interacting with other humans, understanding our place in the world, etc.). I think the challenge for Travis and others is how to present mythical thinking as an additional source of truth without appearing to devalue and undermine rational thinking.
I’m extremely interested in studying more about how those of us steeped in all the technological advances of the modern world can ever truly embrace mythical thinking as traditional people would have done. I’m not fully convinced that we really can. Literature seems like one of the ways we can get closest to it, and I believe Travis would argue that religious practices based on a sacramental theology would get us even closer.