While reading through The Wee Free Men, Chapter 4 coincidentally titled "The Wee Free Men" stuck out to me. In this particular chapter, Tiffany flashed back to when Granny Aching was still alive and one of the stunts that she pulled after the Baron pleaded with her to save his sheep-killing dog. This passage can be found from page 105-111. The dog originally would have been placed under the death penalty for such wrongful behavior because of the old laws on the Chalk, but the Baron pleaded with Granny Aching to find a way to save his dog from such fate. After numerous pleas, one of which was by the Baron himself, Granny Aching came up with a solution for this problem. The dog was to be shut in a room with a ewe and her newborn lamb. Everyone watching was baffled by this Granny Aching's solution, but after a few minutes it was clear that the dog has learned his brutal lesson for killing a sheep. Granny Aching was able to teach the dog a lesson without having it killed. All of the townspeople were amazed when they realized what happened. Later, it was found out that what Granny Aching did was just an old shepard trick and that there was no magic involved at all. "That was how it worked. No magic at all. But that time it had been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done..." (Prachett 111).
The fact that it did not stop being a magical occurrence just because Tiffany found out the explanation behind Granny Aching's actions reminded me of the end of "The Hill" by Tanith Lee from The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. Halfway through, I thought it was going to be a short about the walking dead. However, the explanation provided by Miss A at the end about the lizards' role in sacred death practices where they would seek out corpses to possess and dance in took away some of the suspense and mystery that would have been present had she not found out the logical and reasonable explanations behind it all. But according to Tiffany Aching, shouldn't it just as supernatural or magical even if you found out how and why it happened afterwards? Especially if you presumed it to be magical or supernatural in the first place. Why should anything change just because there is now a logical explanation for the occurence if your initial reaction happened to be based on the belief that it was magic or supernatural. I suppose it is up to each person to decide how much importance to place on the reasonable explanation behind something seemingly unexplainable and how it affects their initial beliefs. I personally think it would be nice to look at a situation from all angles, but it should not have to change what I initially believed about the situation and that could be ignorance on my part but that is up to my discretion. I'll accept the other explanations, but the final decision on how to perceive a situation is up to me and I agree with Tiffany Aching. Which way would you choose to go if you found out something that could change your initial gut decision?
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I actually thought the same thing while reading Prachett and ever since we discussed in class about this topic of "fake monsters" and explanations for magic, I have been seriously entertaining this idea as my last paper topic.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you say that "it is up to each person to decided how much importance to place on the reasonable explanation behind something seemingly unexplainable". Clearly we as individual readers and movie viewers have the right to interpret any symbolism and endings as our own, regardless of what other information may be presented to us that contradicts our view. However, this new information that "looks at a situation from all angles" that you say you would like, I believe is harder to ignore than we would like sometimes.
Yes, we as humans have a knack for being ignorant and sticking with our own thoughts as being the only true and right ones, but when, like in The Hill, the magic we wanted so desperately to believe was there, was blatantly revealed to us as just an attestant to science, I find it very difficult indeed to go back and write off that explanation to accept the more fantastical one, however more desirable it may be.
The magic has literally been stripped away from it, beaten, and thrown in the trash. It's very tragic actually. For just once (while reading a book of the greatest fantasy stories at that) it would be nice to not have to explain something with fact. Why can't magic just be the reasoning? It would be nice, but when a 'logical' explanation is introduced, those things tend to be hard to just disregard.
I think looking at other texts, such as Lee's "The Hill," in the light of Tiffany's wise observation is a great paper topic. I think you're both missing Tiffany's point, though: that magic and the supernatural are quite independent of one another; the latter need not be present for the former to exist. To understand this, it seems to me, is to understand much about not only the genre of fantasy, but about the world and our place in it.
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