One of the key elements of the Harry Potter universe is that the magic stuff is kept separate and secret from the normal world where the Muggles live. This is all very fun, and it's very appealing to children to think that magic could be lurking around any corner if they were only able to see it. It's probably appealing to adults too. But, as Hagrid asserts at some point, most witches and wizards have Muggle relatives. Harry Potter lives with three muggles, Hermione's parents are muggles, one of the other kids has one parent that's a muggle and the other that's a witch.
Also, the Prime Minister of England knows about the wizard world, and by extension, probably some other key figures in government.
According to various places online, there's about 40 new kids at Hogwarts every year, resulting in about 280 students overall, with about 10 new kids in each house, each year, split roughly half and half between boys and girls. It's great that magic obeys these rules, because it would be really inconvenient if there were 15 new kids one year, and only one of them was a boy, for example. Would he have to stay in a room by himself? Would all 14 new girls stay in the same big room or would they split into two or three smaller rooms? Whatever. I thought maybe there might be other schools in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, though less prestigious, but according to Rowling, there are about 3,000 wizards in England, which works our mathematically pretty well with the '40 new wizard births per year' estimate.
So there's 3,000 wizards, and lets just estimate maybe 7,000 other people who are close enough relatives to a wizard that they know that wizards exist. 10,000 human beings in a population of 50,000,000. That's .02%, which may seem like a very small amount. But keeping secrets is tough. If you're .02% of 5,000 then it's a bit easier to keep a secret, because you're the only one who knows it. I think there's some saying about how a secret isn't secret if you tell someone. Anyway...
Keeping a secret is tough. Especially if it's a really cool secret, like "magic is real." 10,000 people would have a hard time keeping a collective secret, especially when they have no real knowledge of each other, no collective understanding or mission or goal. Most of the wizards don't seem to know why they need to keep things secret from the muggles, they just do because otherwise they'll get punished by the bizarre, threatening dictators who run the Ministry and do mind wipes on anyone who learns something they shouldn't. And why wouldn't people talk to each other about it? I mean, not everyone is like Harry's aunt and uncle - in this world, the world that Harry Potter's world is supposed to be secret from, there are millions of people who would be very excited to know that magic is real. Instead, all the non-magic adults in the Harry Potter books are either quietly excited for their children but happy to go back to their really boring jobs where there isn't any magic (sorry, no. If my kid was going off to Hogwarts, I'd like like: "I want to live in Hogsmeade. There's plenty of work that I could do there that doesn't require magic." I'd be like 'Bicycle Repair Man' in the old Monty Python sketch.)
When children of muggles get their Hogwarts letter, it's not like the rest of their family get a different letter that says "If you share this with anyone your mind will be erased. I mean it, Muggle. Just trust us though, your kid is going to love it here, and you're going to enjoy having a wizard kid. Unless your kid is one of the 25% of students who go to Slytherin, in which case, you've just stepped onto the set for the next Omen movie, prepare to die. Even though we know for a fact that this house is essentially a training ground for evil, bullying, small-minded tyrants, we just keep sailing along because you know, kids gotta follow their hearts and stuff."
Whoa. Tangent there.
Where am I going with this? Oh right. Knowledge of magic. As is implied in the books themselves, muggles don't see anything that they don't want to see. In general, the farther a person is from something extraordinary, the less likely they are to believe it's real, or think about it too hard. There are many other examples of books where magic is real, no one tries to hide it from non-magic people, and because there's so few real magic users, most people just go about their lives and are kind of surprised when they see real magic. But it doesn't change their own life in any significant way, so they set it on the shelf of their mind and worry about the things that matter to them. Kiki's Delivery Service is a great example of that - Kiki goes to the big, modern city, and she's the only witch in the place. People know that witches are real, but it's been so long since they've seen one in person that it's like they're a myth. Kiki finds her place among them, with some people being very friendly and happy to have a witch as a friend, and others preferring to ignore her. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud is another example where magic and non-magic co-exist in the world. In that series, magic users are also the power elite of the world, and there's a distinct class separation between magic and non-magic folks. The magic-users become politicians and leaders, and everyone else is a peasant. Not exactly fun-loving and 'magical' in the Disney sense, but a scenario that is easy to accept, if you accept that a small number of people can do magic. In the books of Diana Wynne Jones, particularly the Chrestomanci series, and the Howl's Moving Castle series, magic users live amongst non-magic users, but occupy the fringes of society, or are just outside of normal people's understanding. So there are ways to do it that make it easier, as a reader, to invest in the whole world.
Why is this important? I mean, why not have it exactly as Rowling imagines it? Well, as a grown up person who lives in the Muggle world, I'm being lumped in with a bunch of ignorant, blind, jerks who would respond to the existence of magic with hatred and violence. And that's not true. It also basically tells every kid in the world reading those books that by the time they've reached adulthood, they will be dead inside and incapable of believing in magic. Now get back to work at the factory. Or the office. Or wherever it is you go to live out your non-magical life.
One of the draws of Harry Potter is that he's a 'normal' kid that gets caught up in the world of wizardry and gets to take part in it and have adventures. However, in the Harry Potter world, the possibility of an actual normal kid being able to have those adventures is pretty much zero. And if you do, you'll have your mind wiped because you can't be trusted.
I think it would be completely feasible to have non-magic people be marginally aware of but generally dismissive of the world of magic. I think there would be a natural, non-forced separation between the two worlds. I think there would be plenty of magic users who would caution their wizard friends to keep a low profile, because some muggles can get freaked out and violent when confronted with things they don't understand, while others can become obsessed fans. Those are more realistic reasons to keep a low profile. The flying car, seen by everyone in Book 2? Still bad. Still enough to make many wizards upset. But on the muggle side, most of the people seeing that in the paper would think it's a hoax, a few would be angry about magic users, and a few would be excited. Those would be fun elements to add into the story. Voldemort, like other authoritarian style political figures, could easily twist the haters to his whimsy, using them as a blunt instrument against magic users who oppose him. Some non-magic kid could go from obsessed fan to accidental hero and get pulled into the story for a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment