THE CITY

The City
the serious issues of ‘real life.’ It might be fine for children to read about
knights and wizards, but an adult should grow out of it and graduate into
reading novels that address life as it really is.
However, this objection does not hold water. To begin with, stories set
in the ‘real world’ may offer to the reader a view of the world that is as
unrealistic in its own way as any fantasy with elves and magic: a world
in which violence solves problems, narcotic-fueled parties are endlessly
exciting, wealth and power are readily available, intrigues happen without
messy consequences of shattered families and betrayed friends, and women
magically make bad men good by the power of their love (or through sex).
‘Escapism’ in its negative sense is far more likely to be produced by
what C.S. Lewis calls “superficially realistic” literature, which presents
“things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have
happened if the reader had had a fair chance”. 20 Such escapism is far more
likely than fantasy to provoke envy, fruitless discontent, and a refusal to
deal with the life and relationships a person really has; it can give a gloss
of excitement or normality to behavior that in real life is destructive:
adultery, drug-taking, abusive relationships. Fantasy can be escapist in
the negative sense, to be sure – but it would be a feature of bad fantasy, as
it is a feature of bad literature of any genre or bad art in any form.
Taking pleasure in the ‘escape’ offered by a fantasy novel is not a
mark of immaturity or shallowness – far from it. Depending on one’s
circumstances, Escape may be sensible or even heroic, just as it might be
in ‘real life’. As Tolkien puts it:
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. 21
Furthermore, to escape means to recognize both something negative to
be escaped from, and something positive to be escaped into – and so the
experience of fantasy is in a constant dialogue with reality both as it is
and as it could or should be. The reader who escapes into a good fantasy
does not return to ‘real life’ unchanged.
20
C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” In On Stories and Other Essays on
Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1982), 38.
21
Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” 69.
66