A few years ago, I wrote a piece on D&D as a kind of 'monastery of the mind', which seemed to strike a chord with some readers.
I was thinking about this earlier today when paging through a PG Wodehouse book and coming across a quote from Evelyn Waugh, I think on the occasion of Wodehouse's death:
'Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that might be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.'
This finds an echo in what Wodehouse said about his own work:
'I believe that there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn...'
The path of my life reading books, watching films, etc., has gone on an up-and-down trajectory. As a child, like most children, I went for the 'musical comedies without music'; then I grew up, or thought I grew up, and got very into the sort of books that try to go 'right deep down into life'. Now, as time goes on, I find things have gone full circle and I have a newfound appreciation for the type of fiction that ignores real life altogether once more.
You might be tempted to call this type of thing 'escapism'. And here perhaps you will be thinking of a familiar Tolkien quote:
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
I am a bigger fan of Tolkien than Wodehouse. (Though I don't consider Wodehouse a bad writer or anything.) The Lord of Rings is about what sustains us in hard times. It is pretty grim in some places. Wodehouse is light and frothy. There is a place for P.G.s type of escapism, but I find Tolkien's more useful. If that makes sense.
ReplyDeleteSame here.
DeleteWell said.
ReplyDeleteExcellently put. My shelter consists of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and their co-constructed world, and the many books of Gerald Durrell, particularly those about his family in Corfu, featuring his older brother the novelist Lawrence Durrell, when he was a proto-counter-culturalist literary revolutionary.
ReplyDeleteNever heard of them! Thanks for the nudge.
DeleteI've had interesting conversations about escapism and the role of "fantasy" or the fantastic; while some people find it hard to immerse in any fiction that contains fantastical elements, I have the opposite issue; unless something is exceptionally well-written it holds little interest for me unless it contains something fantastical. I disagree, though, with those who think the distinction is one of "reality". Being as blunt as possible, most people do not live in "reality". They live in a fantasy, part constructed by mutual social consensus, part imparted by media, etc. It's one big narrative, with many factions and differences of emphasis, but aspiring to hegemony, not plurality, and unaccustomed to confronting alternatives (note that I'm not denying opposition, I'm saying instead that recognised opposition doesn't challenge a narrative, it is part of its structure). A writer of the fantastical, the speculative, the alternative, is at least *aware* that they are deviating from reality in many ways. They know where they are depicting subtle (or non-subtle) truths or useful perspectives, and where they are circumventing reality. The only difference between the writer of the fantastical and the writer of "realism" is that the latter usually believes themselves to be writing in accordance with reality at all times. Instead, it is simply fantasy generally lacking in self-awareness. For me, insightful and rewarding ideas, real mental stimulation, can only really come from the interplay of various narratives that between them reveal emergent truths or place those narratives in a larger context from which points of familiarity can be appreciated. It's just a much larger conceptual space. "Escapism" to me isn't "escape from reality", much the opposite. It is "escape from hegemonic narrative". Being "neuro-atypical" (to use a convenient if weaselly phrase) and, as a consequence, having had to develop a complex theory of mind considerably earlier than most, I've always lived in a plurality, have always needed a space-between-spaces to work in. That's what the fantastical is.
ReplyDeleteI would disagree with your assertion that most people don't live in reality - I don't think human beings, by definition, live in reality as such, as we're all stuck in our own perception of it. Some of us may be more aware of this fact that others but it's not possible to escape it. (Although meditation helps to a certain extent.)
DeleteGood point. Perhaps "reality" is the wrong word; as you say, no human perception can encase reality. I should have been more careful in my phrasing. Perhaps it would be better for me to stress the advantage of maintaining consistency across a plurality of scale. Comparing the classic six blind men describing an elephant to people who can see the elephant, and from there to people who have some awareness of the wider elephant species and so can contextualise the elephant within elephants in general; and from there people with some understanding of ecology and the placement of elephants within it. Plus comprehension of human response to elephants in everything from appreciation of the biological animal to the various mythological and cultural contextualizations, and which of these are grounded in the biological compared to those that aren't. All of these incorporated, ideally, into one comprehension. The more internally consistent an understanding across multiple scales, the less you run up against the frustration of people playing with matches then bemoaning their house burning down. It's sort of like the quantum efficiency in photosynthesis -- all perspectives can resolve into an efficient one, whereas single channels lead to inefficiencies and conflicts.
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