My Escapism Wants Reality
Apr. 14th, 2024 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiIf you have almost three hours to spend on intellectual unpacking of Twilight, I highly recommend Natalie Wynn’s recent video on Twilight, escapist literature, sexual fantasy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, TERFs, the Dao, and much more! One of her contentions is that some critiques of the Twilight novels are misplaced because they conflate escapist literary fantasy with reality: Edward and Bella are not supposed to be a realistic blueprint for a healthy couple; they are supposed to a female-tilted romantic fantasy—fun escapism.
Her observations made me reflect on something that’s re-occurred to me over the years: my readerly “escapism” seems different from most people’s. The normative use of “escapism” seems to denote enjoying the unrealistic: the fantasy that Edward and Bella are a healthy couple, the idea that it can be sexy to be sexually assaulted, that it’s fun to be an assassin, etc. [1] But I’m one of those people who may often be caught kvetching that these works are not realistic and this makes them frustrating and stupid.
So do I just not read for escapism? Au contraire. The feeling of escaping into literature has been one of the highest pleasures of my life since I was very little. I’m a lifelong fantasy and science reader, and very rarely really enjoy novels set in the fairly recent real world. So I must be longing to escape some part of reality.
But what do I find escapist; i.e. what stories have carried me away into the catharsis of other worlds and other lives? Here’s a fairly random list of some of my A-list: The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, The Lord of the Rings, the Iliad, Mirage of Blaze, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Last Unicorn, Trigun, Wuthering Heights (repeatedly referenced by Wynn). What do all of these works have in common, besides not being set in my contemporary real world? Well, they are all stories in which life is really hard, and it’s hard, in part, for internal psychological reasons that point to deficits in the main characters. And those psychological profiles make sense: they feel psychologically realistic.
* Ivan’s disillusion with God – realistic
* Pip’s insecurity and need to prove he’s a true gentleman – searingly realistic
*Frodo’s just having limits – realistic
* Achilles’ rage and grief – realistic
* The gaping hole where Kagetora’s sense of self-worth should be – realistic (alas)
* Estraven’s endurance despite suicidal ideation – realistic
* Schmendrick’s balancing act between faith in his magic and being ground down into cynicism – realistic
* Wolfwood: being an assassin is not fun – realistic
* Heathcliff’s rage over being mistreated – a bit psychologically deterministic but with a lot of realism
I escape into psychological realism, especially where there is a recognition that grappling with oneself can be difficult and painful and that other people are people too, just as complex and human as we are. Things aren’t easily reducible to pat answers.
Why is this my escapism? Isn’t that just real life? Isn’t that what we’re stuck with every day? Yes, but... here’s the revelation Wynn’s video catalyzed for me. While this is a large piece of daily reality, our society serially lies about it. Most of our social order misrepresents human life. Our dominant economic system is running (destroying) the world based on the patently false belief that all humans are sociopaths who care for nothing but personal acquisition and that this is right and proper. Our dominant attitude toward poverty is that people should thrive (in a bootstrappy way) by being treated like scum, told they’re lazy, and everything wrong in their life is their own fault. Our mainstream relationship culture still believes that all important, non-familial relationships are based on sexual attraction (which is frustrating for me as an asexual friendship bonder); it believes friendship—by definition—cannot mean more than a mutual convenience (don’t tell me it doesn’t; I’m writing a book on it). It’s a society in love with the idea of white hats and black hats: victims and perpetrators, oppressed and oppressor, righteous and villainous—whether your left or right, there’s often precious little room for gray.
It’s a society by which I feel thoroughly gaslit, constantly barraged by messages that humanity is not what it plainly is, that the psyche doesn’t work the way it plainly does. I don’t find Edward and Bella escapist; I find them amusing. But if I were younger and more impressionable, I would find them gaslighty, in the sense that their story is trying to gaslight me, that it’s entry number 7061 in a succession of romances selling me lies: that there’s only one important girl, that the guys will fall over her while she does nothing but just exist, etc., etc., etc. I knew from personal experience that that was not the truth by the time I was five, but when it’s 90% of all you’re ever fed and you’re not given any other viable paradigm for having value as a human being, it’s really damaging—not Twilight, but the accumulation of “Twilights.” Constant bombardment by “escapist” lies is the reality I have always lived in.
Since I was a child, some version of this has made me long to escape into representations of the real: stories where people are complicated and endings are not just “happily ever after,” where sacrifices hurt and good is not always rewarded, and you’ll probably mess up and do genuinely bad thing that will haunt you. It’s not that it all has to be bleak—I’m actually not that attached to very dark stories and bummer endings. But I want—I need—the real shades. I’m sick of being lied to.
Throughout Wynn’s Twilight video, I had the weird feeling that she was almost talking about Mirage of Blaze: being ravished (in fantasy) is sexy because it allows sexual passion without having to take responsibility for owning sexual passion, desire is like a black hole of lack, it can never be fulfilled; it’s trajectory is ultimately to destroy itself, etc. I mean, this is Naoe and Kagetora. So why do I love them with all my heart and not the traditional bodice rippers Wynn was referencing? Because Mirage takes the tropes and gets real. Case in point, yes, Kagetora does want to be ravished by Naoe because it allows him to experience sexual passion passively without having to take responsibility for it—and he goes through a bloody long and painful process of coming to grips with this, taking ownership, taking the blame for his part in their destructive patterns, realizing that Naoe gets really wounded by these patterns too, and so on. I love Mirage because it scoots right past the fantasy desire up to unavoidable conclusion that it is self-immolating (a “mirage,” one might say), and then goes beyond that to the other side—or at least points toward the other side. It’s got the sexual fantasy tropes, but it plays them like they’re happening to real people. [2] It doesn’t lie to me, not where it counts.
And if anybody can point me to more of that kind of escapist reading, I will be forever grateful.
Notes:
[1] I don’t doubt it is for some people somewhere at some moments because life is complicated, but as a generalization, I hope we agree it’s not sexy.
[2] True, there is an element of distance from reality here: these are four hundred-year-old warriors, not some poor teenage kids really grappling with a deeply destructive, abusive relationship. No, I would not find that escapist, as I don’t find contemporary realism, in general, escapist. Part of that may be because I personally can’t, in good conscience, get cathartic release from something really close to real-life people suffering. I feel like I need to be alert to that, as an outsider, in a real-life way, as if reading the news. Genre fiction casts everything as metaphor, and it can be real, but it’s real with a symbolic freedom to relate my own life to it.
Her observations made me reflect on something that’s re-occurred to me over the years: my readerly “escapism” seems different from most people’s. The normative use of “escapism” seems to denote enjoying the unrealistic: the fantasy that Edward and Bella are a healthy couple, the idea that it can be sexy to be sexually assaulted, that it’s fun to be an assassin, etc. [1] But I’m one of those people who may often be caught kvetching that these works are not realistic and this makes them frustrating and stupid.
So do I just not read for escapism? Au contraire. The feeling of escaping into literature has been one of the highest pleasures of my life since I was very little. I’m a lifelong fantasy and science reader, and very rarely really enjoy novels set in the fairly recent real world. So I must be longing to escape some part of reality.
But what do I find escapist; i.e. what stories have carried me away into the catharsis of other worlds and other lives? Here’s a fairly random list of some of my A-list: The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, The Lord of the Rings, the Iliad, Mirage of Blaze, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Last Unicorn, Trigun, Wuthering Heights (repeatedly referenced by Wynn). What do all of these works have in common, besides not being set in my contemporary real world? Well, they are all stories in which life is really hard, and it’s hard, in part, for internal psychological reasons that point to deficits in the main characters. And those psychological profiles make sense: they feel psychologically realistic.
* Ivan’s disillusion with God – realistic
* Pip’s insecurity and need to prove he’s a true gentleman – searingly realistic
*Frodo’s just having limits – realistic
* Achilles’ rage and grief – realistic
* The gaping hole where Kagetora’s sense of self-worth should be – realistic (alas)
* Estraven’s endurance despite suicidal ideation – realistic
* Schmendrick’s balancing act between faith in his magic and being ground down into cynicism – realistic
* Wolfwood: being an assassin is not fun – realistic
* Heathcliff’s rage over being mistreated – a bit psychologically deterministic but with a lot of realism
I escape into psychological realism, especially where there is a recognition that grappling with oneself can be difficult and painful and that other people are people too, just as complex and human as we are. Things aren’t easily reducible to pat answers.
Why is this my escapism? Isn’t that just real life? Isn’t that what we’re stuck with every day? Yes, but... here’s the revelation Wynn’s video catalyzed for me. While this is a large piece of daily reality, our society serially lies about it. Most of our social order misrepresents human life. Our dominant economic system is running (destroying) the world based on the patently false belief that all humans are sociopaths who care for nothing but personal acquisition and that this is right and proper. Our dominant attitude toward poverty is that people should thrive (in a bootstrappy way) by being treated like scum, told they’re lazy, and everything wrong in their life is their own fault. Our mainstream relationship culture still believes that all important, non-familial relationships are based on sexual attraction (which is frustrating for me as an asexual friendship bonder); it believes friendship—by definition—cannot mean more than a mutual convenience (don’t tell me it doesn’t; I’m writing a book on it). It’s a society in love with the idea of white hats and black hats: victims and perpetrators, oppressed and oppressor, righteous and villainous—whether your left or right, there’s often precious little room for gray.
It’s a society by which I feel thoroughly gaslit, constantly barraged by messages that humanity is not what it plainly is, that the psyche doesn’t work the way it plainly does. I don’t find Edward and Bella escapist; I find them amusing. But if I were younger and more impressionable, I would find them gaslighty, in the sense that their story is trying to gaslight me, that it’s entry number 7061 in a succession of romances selling me lies: that there’s only one important girl, that the guys will fall over her while she does nothing but just exist, etc., etc., etc. I knew from personal experience that that was not the truth by the time I was five, but when it’s 90% of all you’re ever fed and you’re not given any other viable paradigm for having value as a human being, it’s really damaging—not Twilight, but the accumulation of “Twilights.” Constant bombardment by “escapist” lies is the reality I have always lived in.
Since I was a child, some version of this has made me long to escape into representations of the real: stories where people are complicated and endings are not just “happily ever after,” where sacrifices hurt and good is not always rewarded, and you’ll probably mess up and do genuinely bad thing that will haunt you. It’s not that it all has to be bleak—I’m actually not that attached to very dark stories and bummer endings. But I want—I need—the real shades. I’m sick of being lied to.
Throughout Wynn’s Twilight video, I had the weird feeling that she was almost talking about Mirage of Blaze: being ravished (in fantasy) is sexy because it allows sexual passion without having to take responsibility for owning sexual passion, desire is like a black hole of lack, it can never be fulfilled; it’s trajectory is ultimately to destroy itself, etc. I mean, this is Naoe and Kagetora. So why do I love them with all my heart and not the traditional bodice rippers Wynn was referencing? Because Mirage takes the tropes and gets real. Case in point, yes, Kagetora does want to be ravished by Naoe because it allows him to experience sexual passion passively without having to take responsibility for it—and he goes through a bloody long and painful process of coming to grips with this, taking ownership, taking the blame for his part in their destructive patterns, realizing that Naoe gets really wounded by these patterns too, and so on. I love Mirage because it scoots right past the fantasy desire up to unavoidable conclusion that it is self-immolating (a “mirage,” one might say), and then goes beyond that to the other side—or at least points toward the other side. It’s got the sexual fantasy tropes, but it plays them like they’re happening to real people. [2] It doesn’t lie to me, not where it counts.
And if anybody can point me to more of that kind of escapist reading, I will be forever grateful.
Notes:
[1] I don’t doubt it is for some people somewhere at some moments because life is complicated, but as a generalization, I hope we agree it’s not sexy.
[2] True, there is an element of distance from reality here: these are four hundred-year-old warriors, not some poor teenage kids really grappling with a deeply destructive, abusive relationship. No, I would not find that escapist, as I don’t find contemporary realism, in general, escapist. Part of that may be because I personally can’t, in good conscience, get cathartic release from something really close to real-life people suffering. I feel like I need to be alert to that, as an outsider, in a real-life way, as if reading the news. Genre fiction casts everything as metaphor, and it can be real, but it’s real with a symbolic freedom to relate my own life to it.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-15 08:25 am (UTC)For SF, I think you'd like Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books, and Arkady Martine's two Teixcalaan novels which I just read - all of those about very different societies you can immerse yourself in.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-16 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-15 01:08 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed Natalie's video (I have listened to it multiple times now), and also really enjoyed reading your thoughts on it here. I don't necessarily agree with all of Natalie's conclusions, or I guess it might be more accurate to say I simply conceptualize some of the concepts she discusses in a different way--but I do think she says some very useful things about the psychological aspects of fantasy and how humans will inevitably manifest those things in art in ways that may seem bizarre or even disturbing when we try to approach them with logic and realism. Twilight isn't my escapism either. I do find it sort a fascinating case study (as does Natalie, clearly), but it's not my kind of fantasy. I'm sure someone could have a field day breaking down the stuff I enjoy in fantasy, which is no doubt weird and distasteful to someone else.
I don't think of escapism as the unrealistic, so much as... in order to be escapism, a work of fiction needs to transport you out of your own world somehow. Sometimes literally into another world, as so many people enjoy science fiction and fantasy. But sometimes, just... into a sphere of existence that is different from your own, in overt or subtle ways. Natalie talks in other videos about how desire is always for something you lack, and to me escapist fiction gives you something you don't get from your real life. It satisfies some desire. It doesn't necessarily have to be unrealistic to do that, since you can desire something that really exists, just not in your life. But it also needs a point of connection, a way of relating to the new experience that allows you to enter the fictional world and become immersed in it. Maybe the best escapism is going to be a balance of the familiar and the fantastical that will be different for everyone, but when you experience a story that hits just right for you, that perfect balance of comfort and wonder—that's when a work really blows you away and you just want to climb inside it, enjoy that immersion, and that's escapism in the best way.
For some people, Twilight fits that formula (I mean it must, given its success), but if you feel like it's just handing you the same stale untruths you feel bombarded with in daily life, then there's no escape there. It's never going to hit right.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-16 01:15 am (UTC)On that level, of course, one draw of Mirage for me is that it's about two men, the great draw of BL/slash, in general, as Natalie noted. I've asked myself if I'd like Mirage as much if it were essentially the same story but with a woman as one of the principals. The short answer is no, largely because of the escapism + my internalized misogyny. But the deeper answer is I'm not sure that's possible (right now). I'm not sure our society (I mean globally) is quite ready to write women that well. I can't think of one.
(The closest I can think of to a female character in the "style" of a Mirage protagonist--I mean that deep and weird and hard-hittingly human--is probably Lise from The Brothers Karamazov, which is odd because she's such a minor character in terms of page count. But she really strikes a chord for me I haven't seen with a woman elsewhere.)
I'd be interested to know more about what you like in fantasy lit if you ever feel like sharing. :)