Late last year, in a year that feels like it’s not really over yet, and might possibly never be over, I saw people talking about escapism in fiction again. I say “again” not tiredly or grumpily, but because this notion, this topic, comes around like clockwork—well, unpredictable clockwork. Maybe it’s more like a whack-a-mole topic. It just won’t stay down.
But of course it’s coming back now, when the things that are bad keep proving that they can keep getting worse. Of course it is a topic or a question or a complaint: What about escaping into books? Is that good or bad? Is it a cop-out? Is it burying your head in the sand? Is it necessary?
Every time I see this come up—or click on another Reddit thread either asking for escapist books or complaining about their very existence (there are more of both than you might expect)—I wonder whether everyone is talking about something different. Is escape the same as comfort? Is coziness escape? What if your version of escape is to get out of your own life and (fictionally) experience something absolutely terrifying? Are we running from or running to? Does it matter?
It seems to be fairly hard to talk about escapist fiction without sounding either defensive or dismissive. I would rather not be either; I don’t think fun, lighter-weight books need defending, and I am trying to weed out my own occasional snobbishness on the matter. I am not entirely sure if said snobbishness is about books or readers, and that, right there, is the ugly little thought that made me ask: Are conversations about escapism actually about what people read, or how they read it? Is this whole conversation really a variant of “Someone is wrong on the internet,” but they’re at home and have no idea they’re under discussion?
Like plenty of other SFF readers, I stumbled across what I now suspect is a fairly famous Tolkien quote about escape. For me this stumbling was fairly recent, as I’d never read Tolkien’s nonfiction—I’d never even heard of The Monsters and the Critics until a couple years ago. In that collection’s “On Fairy-Stories,” which is a really wonderful piece, he wrote:
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers of Escape are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. 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.”
Tolkien was writing in a very different time. The geeks had not yet taken control of the box office and much of popular culture (a conversation for a different time). Genre snobbery was far more reaching and pernicious. Writers and readers had quite valid reasons to be cranky about the dismissal of entire genres as escapist and unimportant. (I suspect a lot of romance readers are still familiar with these feelings.)
In more recent years, though, writers have said similar things. Hari Kunzru, in a Guardian piece, in 2014:
“Escape is derided as the cheapest of literary pleasures, ‘escapism’ the name for a particular kind of aesthetic cowardice, a culpable flight from the real. But there are situations when what you need is teleportation. You need to get out of the surgical ward. You need to stay in Earthsea for as long as your imagination can float its little open boat.”
It’s not all of SFF that’s being charged with escapism these days; it’s just corners of it. I hesitate to say which or why, because it’s never consistent. If you look at a list of recommended “escapist” reads you will find books that make no sense to you. I can almost guarantee this, because every time I’ve come across one of these lists I’ve found something that baffles me, pleasantly or irritatingly. (I love that the first book in this thread is Piranesi.) It’s the oft-personal nature of escape: Each person reading a list of recommendations can’t know what any other given reader needs or wants to escape from. Or where they yearn to escape to.
I want to pause for just a second and say that escape in one’s imagination is not at all the same as escape from the very real, dangerous, and deadly situations people all over the globe are in at any given moment; situations brought on by greed, ideology, climate change and those who perpetuate it, hatred, and more other kinds of ugliness than I can list in a single paragraph. If a book is a respite, a way out of suffering, that is a good thing. But I want to be clear that I am not equating things that are worlds away from equal.
What I keep coming back to is that escape is not necessarily disengagement. Escape is not, to borrow Tolkien’s word, desertion. Escape from the everyday, if you are living under generally reasonable circumstances, is a coffee break, a nap, a moment where you just sit on the sofa and stare into space. A walk around the block, or around a lot of blocks. Sometimes you need to look away from a thing so that you can look back at it with fresh eyes. Maybe that thing is work, maybe it’s news, maybe it’s personal. To use a corny workout metaphor, your mind needs rest days, just like your body does.
I can get fed up with every side of this argument, when it’s an argument—the people saying we must escape and the people saying we mustn’t. If you can be a snob at everyone, it’s what my brain wants to do. I’m trying not to do this. I am trying to stick with what I said in the very first Mark as Read column: There’s no wrong way to read a book. I think it’s best to read widely and diversely, and maybe it’s worth including works that are lighter and those that are more challenging. On hard level and, yes, sometimes on easy level. Maybe not a steady diet of fluff or fiber. But what’s fluff, and who decides, and who’s to say without reading it that said fluff doesn’t have a steely backbone and a rebellious heart?
I’ve been reading middle grade fiction lately because of a project idea that’s bouncing around in my brain. Is it easy? On some levels, sure, for an adult. But there is a streamlined elegance, an emotional clarity, an awareness of audience, that is artful—and not easy to write. Children’s books authors, too, get dismissed for not writing “real books.” Are we going to judge children for reading things that are “easy”?
What is escapist lit? Every answer I’ve read is incomplete, because it’s not one thing. It’s not a kind of book, I think, but a kind of reading, surface level, unengaged, uncurious, staying in a walled garden and never peeking over the edges. Books offer their readers things; readers take from the books what they find, and what they’re looking for. I think there are plenty of readers who could be bolder, more curious. I hope there are a lot who already are.
I can’t land on a straight answer to any of my own questions about what makes something escapist and what it means. For me, it turns out, this topic is too unstable. Are we talking about happy books or didactic books? Ones that never offer any conflict or ones in which the answers are too easy? Books that are badly written or books that are unchallenging? I don’t know. I think the reason I keep coming back to the concept is semantic: What, exactly, are all these conversations about escapism and fiction about? Are they about content or form? How much is still just genre snobbery in ever more complex directions?
I’ve found one definition of escapism that I think I can get behind. I was looking for Le Guin’s paraphrase of Tolkien, to see how it worked, and found her 1974 piece “Escape Routes” instead. It’s not the only time she wrote about escapism, and at The Paris Review, Michael Chabon has a beautiful paragraph summarizing her arguments about escapism as a “subversive force.” But there was a kind of escapism of which she was more critical:
“Recent American SF has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all the ‘relevant’ problems. Again, Dangerous Visions was a regular textbook in Problems (and my story was one of the chapters). But what worries me is that so many of these stories and books have been written in a savagely self-righteous tone, a tone that implies there’s an answer, a simple answer, and why can’t all you damn fools out there see it? Well, I call this escapism: a sensationalist raising of a real question, followed by a quick evasion of the weight and pain and complexity involved in really, experientially, trying to understand and cope with that question.”
The piece ends, a few paragraphs later, “The door to the future will be open.”
