The Question of Escapism

The Question of Escapism

One of the first of these is the issue of 'respectability', which you might have thought of before signing up for a module like this. Such modes of writing are, it might be argued, escapist and therefore of little value, particularly when compared to the normative standards of conventional 'realistic' writing. Why bother to take such literature seriously, if "literature" it can be called, when it intentionally sets out to portray and explore 'other' worlds, rather than this world? Isn't this sort of writing born out of day-dreaming and wishfulfilment, an adolescent desire for alternative ways of life or modes of being and experience, and a refusal to accept the normal and ordinary? Before you attempt an answer consider this account, by Patrick Parrinder, of John G. Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976):
Cawelti suggests that the average detective story, western, popular melodrama or SF novel [add Horror and Fantasy] is enjoyed because it is felt to fit into a recognisable narrative pattern and does not pretend to originality. Reading it is a way of entering into 'a well-known and controlled landscape of the imagination', in which we recapture the 'security of the familiar': the tensions, ambiguities, and frustrations of ordinary experience are painted over by magic pigments of adventure, romance and mystery. The world takes on the shape of our heart's desire.

According to this approach, reading works of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror, acts of escape from and evasion of the "real" world, acts of consolation or wishfulfillment - "if only such things were true...". What do you think?

One explanation for the emergence of this form of writing is that it represents either a negative or a positive response to the effects of modern industrial civilisation: in the words of Rosemary Jackson (Fantasy) "fantasy characteristically attempts to compensate for a lack resulting from cultural constraints: it is a literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss". In this light Fantasy literature might be seen, negatively, as a kind of steam-valve, the expression of a yearning for disappearing sense of the miraculous, the transcendental and supernatural, the extraordinary and 'other'. In a positive light, however, Fantasy literature can be seen to be based on a radical, utopian and liberating vision, championing the 'Imagination' and its products. Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, defended Romance fiction precisely because it could allow the reader to escape into an imaginative world, rather than being dragged down into the mire of 'realist' fiction and what he described as the "besetting particularity of fiction". Great writing, he argues, should "satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream". Romance and Fantasy, purposefully avoiding the mundanity of "empirical realism", act as conduits for the imagination, the spirit and human soul which refuses to be tied down to a world of empirical and scientific certainties, and the ordinariness of bourgeois suburban experience.

How far would you go along with this argument? Can you think of counter-arguments?

One alternative argument would be that, far from avoiding the ""Real", literature of the fantastic is actually more valuable than so-called "realistic" fiction, in that it offers startling and new ("novel") ways of dealing with this world. This argument would suggest that Fantastic literature, whilst it may appear comparatively modern (seeming to emerge simultaneously with the emergence of Western mass industrial society in the nineteenth century), rather belongs to long-standing and established modes of writing - the Romance, the Epic, the Fable, the Allegory, the Satire - modes which, whilst they appeared to be 'escapist', were means of writing about this world, presenting it as strange and alien ('other), showing up its absurdities, limits and arbitrariness. To paraphrase the assignment question from last year, "Fantastic Literature might appear to take us to alternative worlds, but more frequently it offers an inverted yet revealing portrait of this world". Fantasy might, therefore, even have political or radical implications, allowing us to question this world, and the basis upon which it is organised and held together. This, I think, is what Rosemary Jackson means by the following:
...fantastic literature points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the Law, that which is outside dominant value systems. The Fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made 'absent'.... Since this excursion into disorder can only begin from a base within the dominant cultural order, literary fantasy is a telling index of the limits of that order. Its introduction of the 'unreal' is set against the category of the 'real' - a category which the fantastic interrogates by its difference. (Fantasy, p.4 )

Abstract though this seems it does raise important issues. What do the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, such as 'The Black Cat', or Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reveal about the "ordinary" in which ordinary people can do such extraordinary and terrifying things? Does Fantastic Literature have a great deal to say about "ordinary experience"?

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Approaches to the Study of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror