Why Fantasy is NOT "Mere Escapism"!

You hear it all the time: "I love to read fantasy in order to escape". Even famous authors like Tolkien have added to this idea, as he famously put it: "Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!"

Now, farbeit for me to disagree with the mighty JRRT, but I think we can say more here.

First of all, escape into what? Why? Is our world so bleak and stressful that we need some way to escape from it periodically? Well, that is exactly what people often are saying when they A magical world where there is no stress, no worry, no conflict, and no suffering? Because if that is what we're doing, THAT makes no sense. How many fantasy worlds are absolutely riven with death, destruction, chaos, and mayhem? Especially with the rise in popularity of "grimdark" fantasy, it makes little sense that when people are reading it that they are "escaping" anything. If anything, it seems more likely that they are escaping boredom more than anything.

But what is "boredom" really about?

Its easy to label a fantasy as "escapism" if there is a happy ending. And, in fact, most folktales, from which much of fantasy is built, have happy endings. But is that really why people enjoy fantasy? Because there are many stories out there that have a happy ending that most people just look at and shrug. Take a lot of the Disney remakes of classic animated movies. They all have happy endings, but many of them are bombing at the box office.

I think a lot of why fantasy gets labeled "escapism" is because many have a rigid dichotomy in their minds of "real vs. fake". In other words, because fantasy, above all other genres, accesses the imagination in the most unlimited way, and the imagination is thought of as "fake", then fantasy stories can easily be dumped into "it's just escapism". So, I ask again: what exactly are people "escaping" when they read stories with suffering, pain, sorrow, death, and all that--all of these elements are present in the most popular fantasy series, including Lord of the Rings. And that's completely ignoring the fact that although Lord of the Rings often gets labeled as having a happy ending, a deeper reading of it reveals that it is actually quite bleak and dark. The Elves have left Middle Earth. Magic is gone forever. Frodo leaves Middle Earth because he is depressed at everything that was lost as a result of Sauron's war...and "leaving Middle Earth" is basically death. So...happy ending? Not really.

But I digress.

The Imagination is not "Fake"

Many kinds of psychotherapy use the imagination to literally heal from terrible psychological trauma. That's not fake. And what I think people are really "escaping" from when they enjoy fantasy is not "stress" or "the worries of day to day struggling", rather what they are escaping from is meaninglessness. Now, one could argue (as nihilists like to do) that life is inherently meaningless. I personally don't understand how you can make such a claim--but that's a subject for another day. In any case, even nihilists will state that "we make our own meaning". I would argue that we find it, but let's not quibble, because what this is saying is that meaning-making (i.e., enjoying fantasy) is a worthy enterprise. In which case, you aren't "escaping" anything. Rather what you are doing is creating! You and the author are building meaning through the telling of a great story.

What about "popcorn" entertainment?

So here is the distinction, I think, between "escapist" fantasy and truly meaning-making fantasy. The difference between simply disappearing into an ego power-fantasy, like one sees in a lot of comic-book stories (but not all of them, however!), or surface level fantasy. If a given fantasy is just preoccupied with juveline power fantasies--i.e., wish-fulfilment fantasy, then it can represent "escapism". Because in those instances you are just pretending that you can wish your way out of common everyday problems. This can be fun, of course, and I don't mean to be snobbish about it. But there are other fantasies which dive much deeper into universal themes that actually enrich and enliven our day-to-day lives, rather than give us a way to flee from it. The best fantasies give us the ability to FACE and CONFRONT life, rather than pretend like it can just be wished away effortlessly with "magic" or "superpowers".

Some good examples are such fantasies that help us deal with coming of age (as in the original Star Wars trilogy), dealing with death and loss (Lord of the Rings), the problem of evil (The First Law trilogy), overcoming oneself and ones overweening pride (A Wizard of Earthsea), overcoming trauma (a LOT of folktales deal with this), war vs. compassion (the Malazan series). These fantasies we can return to again and again because they, through the use of unfettered imagination, craft narratives that embody profound meanings and engage with these subjects in a way that merely talking about them in the abstract cannot touch. And because they use the imagination, they tap into our collective wisdom, gathered over generations not only in our genomes, but in our stories which have stood the test of time because they resonate so deeply with the human condition.

This wisdom is not "fake" because it exists within the imagination. It is one of our greatest resources that we all have.

EG