i promised myself that i wouldn't write more than once a day, because as any teenager knows, when the lectures start coming fast and furious 'round age 16 or so, tuning out is made all the easier.
however - the global impact of the revelation of harry potter's final artistic incarnation has prompted me to write a bit about something that is very near and dear to my heart. and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the role of fantasy in the modern world.
if you look at the general trends of astronomically successful and popular fantasy paradigms, you realize one thing very quickly: they were all born out of war, and darkness, and death. lord of the rings was penned in the midst of the second world war. the world of narnia sprung out of the war's immediate aftermath. and now we have harry potter, a series which admittedly began before our current war [ or series of military and civilian deaths; a rose is a rose... ], but which also pointedly has grown darker and more menacing as time passes. the absolutely mind-blowing sales and publishing records, to me at least, point out the inherently human desire to escape into a realm free of scientific restraints, with chinese fireball dragons or unicorns.
people mock escapism and call it childish, or even worse, cowardly. how can it be so when it seems to impart at least a little hope? and furthermore, if these "avenues of escapism" are so problematic, then severe scrutiny needs to be leveled at religion as a whole.
you can't escape escapism. except maybe through a portkey - and even then, you can't escape the irony.
[ by the way, that image is copyrighted to scholastic, inc. please don't cause me any legal trouble or force me to use my pathetic 1L skills to defend myself from a lawsuit. ]
people mock escapism and call it childish, or even worse, cowardly. how can it be so when it seems to impart at least a little hope? and furthermore, if these "avenues of escapism" are so problematic, then severe scrutiny needs to be leveled at religion as a whole.
you can't escape escapism. except maybe through a portkey - and even then, you can't escape the irony.
[ by the way, that image is copyrighted to scholastic, inc. please don't cause me any legal trouble or force me to use my pathetic 1L skills to defend myself from a lawsuit. ]
1 comment:
re: astronomically successful and popular fantasy
the point about escapism may be valid notwithstanding the following, but i'm not too keen on finding a causal relationship between war, darkness, and death and popular fantasy. i could just as easily claim (a) that war, darkness, and death are non-stop, which makes it difficult to attribute to them discrete occurrences or, alternatively, (b) that fantasy is penned irrespective of the social, political, or moral climate of its day, evidenced by the fact that war, darkness and death are not non-stop and yet fantasy is.
furthermore, i'll have to note that lotr, the chronicles of narnia, and harry potter seem insufficient to me to sustain the proposition that fantasy = escapism. if i can point to the astronomical success of something which is substantively worthwhile as (categories not exclusive) social commentary (lotr) a moral compass (narnia), or just child's entertainment (harry potter), it seems difficult to attribute that success to escapism alone, especially where i think the point about war, darkness, and death falters.
re: escapism as childish
certainly there's a valid point to be sustained about escapism as having value (of hope or otherwise), but i'm not entirely certain that it ought to be constrained to a point about fantasy. fiction as literature is escapism. and just like fiction (or theatre, or the silver screen, or any other pop culture medium of story-telling), "fantasy" is something of a broad term to apply to something like escapism. sure, some fantasy is escapism--perhaps, at that, a lot of fantasy is--but that's not to say that some fantasy isn't more valuable (or more often valued) as social commentary, a moral compass, or child's entertainment.
i think the telling statistic on this point is the astronomical success and popularity of exactly the fantasy you describe. lotr, the chronicles of narnia, and harry potter are **exceptional**, and for that reason make plain the idea that fantasy itself, on the whole, may not be escapism in the larger sense any more than, say, kicking a dog. i kick my dog, sure. and probably a few other people do because it helps them get through the tedium of law school. but that doesn't mean that, just because fantasy can function as escapism, my dog is a hackey-sack.
and that's the real lesson in this.
~ boss.
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