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.
