
Fantasy, the Most Necessary Genre in Literature and Life
It was the maps that captured my adolescent eyes. Simple black lines, not particularly elegant. The forests and mountains were childishly depicted — the mountains, especially so. The paths these ranges took looked nothing like what you’d see in the real world. Even as a kid I knew that. But the words on those maps enchanted me: Gondor, Mordor, Lothlórien, Rivendell. My heart was fifty pages in before my fingers had a chance to find page one. When I did hit page fifty, the pecking order of the real world had fallen to second.
I can still picture it. My early-teen self hidden away in my room, mouth ajar, delightfully lost on that familiar river of symbols; twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation, a strand of DNA as long as a real one and just as formative to my being. Maybe in your case, it was Narnia, Prydain, Watership Down, Hogwarts, or someplace I’ve never been.
Thinking of these stories kindles fond memories, doesn’t it? Perhaps you find yourself with a smile. You pause, allowing your mind to wander back to those places. Take your time, my friend. Indulge and do so without shame, for nostalgia is the truest food for the soul, and the best dishes come from the places that aren’t actually real.
But there’s a price to be paid for these indulgences, isn’t there? A social tab of sorts. While fantasy remains permissible for young minds, it’s a lure we’re supposed to reject once we grow up. Incidentally, this makes fantasy a most-delightfully inverted f-word: fine in the vocabulary of juveniles, but crass when uttered in adult company. I’m going off course, let me get back to the social price of fantasy…it also takes the form of a single word, brandished by those who abstain from the stuff. It’s a word oft-delivered in an accusatory tone, sounding out like Septa Unella’s bell of shame:
Escapism.
The sin in which one willingly embraces that which cannot be, treating the fantastic with the same respect as the real. Now, I could argue all fiction is fantasy, and one can only dispute the degree to which this is the case, but doing so is evading the argument. The indictment is this: it’s wrong to squander inordinate amounts of time in a space that could never plausibly exist. It’s just too fiction-y. Imaginary names and events are fine, but if there be dragons or wizards or ghosts here, it’s scandal. These are Very Serious Times, after all.
Fair enough, these are serious times. But if we put a sharp eye to history, we’ll find its voices said the same of their times and the times before that. Spoiler alert: more serious times will follow our current bout of serious times. It’s fair to say the times were, are, and always shall be serious. A diet of equivalently serious literature doesn’t necessarily make one more fit to face the day. It often makes us feel depressed, defeated. Sometimes pure escapism is what we need to lift our chins and summon the strength to march on.
That’s the part the anti-escapists miss. We aren’t trying to find reality in fantasy. We’re trying to burn off the surplus reality that weighs our soul down. We want to step into a world with “unrealistic” idealism and valor. It keeps those notions from dying in the real world. So why the dragons and wizards and ghosts? Well, we just find life more interesting with them in it. Now I can’t quite defend escapism as virtue, but I will argue it’s a necessity. Let’s put down fantasy-of-literature for a moment and talk about its lesser-acknowledged sibling, what I call fantasy-of-life.
My argument is this: we’re all escapists, but we don’t necessarily acknowledge it. We’re all drinking that same elixir of the fantastic. But because we sip from different-shaped bottles with different labels, we don’t make the connection — or aren’t willing to make the connection. Whatever our particular medicine, we’re convinced it’s the real deal. Now I can hear you shouting: Just what on Middle-Earth is this guy talking about?
Tell me, friend:
When was the last time you wore that lucky jersey, certain in the belief it would carry your team to victory? And when they won the big game, did you establish a mythology around that article of clothing? Did it become a sacred relic, not to be washed for the rest of the season lest its magic be expunged? Was the very fate of your team anchored to that fabric? If I try to pin down such thinking, you’ll shrug and call it harmless superstition. I’ll call it fantasy. Potato, po-tawt-oh.
When was the last time you placed your faith in a politician or political party, certain the resolution of all ills was but one election away? You embraced a dues ex machina more fantastic than anything we escapists find in our books. If I press for answers, you’ll boil it down to hope. It was hope that drove the mindset. Did you notice how deftly hope ushered you past that historical graveyard littered with the corpses of big political promises? I’ll agree, it was hope. But I’ll call the thing behind the hope fantasy.
Have you ever purchased a lottery ticket, and did you spend more time fantasizing about your life after the jackpot than you did considering the real odds of winning? Do you keep up on your horoscope? Have you ever wished upon a shooting star? Lucky socks? Do you believe a deceased loved one talks to you through dreams? Are they looking over your shoulder right now? The list goes on and on; exhibits A through Z in the menagerie of fantasy we cull from real life.
And then there’s the big one, the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla. It also originates from a book of stories, but to suggest these particular stories share a kinship with the word fantasy is fightin’ words — and more than a few fights have been waged over such words. Wars, to be precise. For those not following at home, I’m referring to the eight-hundred-pound gorilla whose name rhymes with Kod. I’ll leave it at that.
Please understand, my intent is not to wage war with cherished beliefs. I only wish to point out we do cherish beliefs that don’t necessarily stand up to intellectual rigors born of the Age of Reason. To believe humanity sailed forward through history on the winds of pure fact is a fantasy of the greatest order. Those winds were impure, laced with centuries of stories masquerading as verifiable truth. This is still the case.
Call it superstition, call it hope. Call it whatever you will, but it all falls into the fantasy bucket in my estimation. Perhaps I’m too promiscuous with my definition of that word, perhaps you’re too rigid with yours. Wherever the boundary, a fascinating question remains: why do we adhere to fantasy despite the regiments of fact that could lance it apart?
The answer, I believe, lies in escapism itself.
We need fantasy to get by. We must break free of reality from time to time. Our very constitution requires this. Just as the lungs need air and the stomach needs food, the soul needs fantasy. Wither they who reject its sustenance.
Fantasy takes many forms. Some of it openly declared — all those books about dragons and wizards and ghosts. But some of it’s deeply entrenched in everyday life. We can’t critique it without giving offense. In the role of devotees, we put our arms around it despite the naysayers because it brings us joy. We find others like ourselves through it. We enter into a confederacy of strangers, bound by a common story. And that union makes all involved feel less like strangers.
Fantasy allows us to imagine a better tomorrow, a day that, deep down, we fear reality will never allow. We have to dream it up before we can take those first steps to make it so. And reality, as it is wont to do, discourages the optimistic soul. It force-feeds us the same plate of gray gruel every day. That we’d seek something with a more zest is perfectly natural, perfectly human.
So to my fellow escapists, I say carry on. To those who don’t yet recognize their escapism, perhaps there’s some food for thought here. The next time you feel inclined to wince at a fellow human who’s nose-deep in a book about dragons or wizards or ghosts, take a moment to reconsider. It might not be the kind of book you read, but it’s the kind of substance you rely on more than you know. It’s likely pulled you through the worst of your days. It’s the unsung hero lurking in the back of your mind, ready to do the heavy lifting when your spirits are down. Fantasy is hope, and we shouldn’t be ashamed to let it carry us away, if only for a while. Cold-hard reality is for the birds.
It’s time for us to part ways, so out comes my wand. With a swish and a flick, I wave it at the screen between us (as we learned from Ms. Rowling, the technique’s all in the wrist). I utter the word nox, and out go the lights. Time for you to get back to work, my friend. Reality awaits.
Jon Aspen is the author of the novel Freelight, from Winterleafe Press. It’s a cold-hard rationalist story about — just kidding! It’s fantasy, of course.
