What‘re We Escaping When We Read?
What Chabon’s magnum opus teaches us.

When I left Canada for college in America, I felt like Harry Potter arriving at Hogwarts. There’s something otherworldly about the act of escaping, especially when you’ve known the thing you’re escaping from for decades.
It’s not the same as going on vacation. When you’re a tourist, you’re using the escape as a mental reprieve, a psychic refill that prepares you to continue your existence at home.
The kind of escape I’m talking about involves a few self-realizations. First, that the reality you’re used to is in some way oppressive. There’s no opportunities for work, you feel like you’re not “where it’s at,” there’s something about yourself that you hate — maybe you’re just bored.
Second, you have this weird need to adapt to something new. People like novelty, learning new rules and integrating different cultures into a unique identity. We like comfort but we also like to fight for survival. War, both physical and internal, gives people purpose.
Third, you want connection. We’re protean creatures, constantly reassessing and regretting and resolving, as we get older. It feels like the people at home are always going to stay the same. Yet there’s a sea of different worlds of others waiting for you to meet them. You have a craving for empathy, to put yourself in the shoes of the moody New Yorkers, or phlegmatic Californians. You want to live multiple lives.
Let me ask you this: what I’ve been talking about is escape in the physical sense, but couldn’t the same be said of the reader of fiction?
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is about the human need and yearning for escapism. The kinds of escapes described in this story are all-encompassing; they range from Joe Kavalier’s escaping Prague to find refuge from the Nazis in New York, to Sammy Clay’s father escaping the trappings of domestic family life to pursue a career as a circus performer, to Joe’s mentor Kornblum who teaches him to escape from locks and coffins simply for the sake of magic.
Chabon levels his attention towards a type of escapism that has become almost overwhelmingly relevant in America’s consumer society: the escape into entertainment. Specifically, “cheap” or “low-brow” forms of entertainment like comic books, TV shows, genre fiction, and (if it had existed when Chabon was writing this book) YouTube videos. We often perceive entertainment as superficial, a waste of time and brain space that at best is a childish evasion of real responsibilities.
Popular entertainment, which Chabon’s narrator states “remain[s] so universally despised,” provides a necessary relief from how “fucked-up and broken” the real world is. That is, a real world that dehumanizes and alienates people through violence, exploitation, bureaucracy, suburbia, and mass production. The narrator argues, “the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf.” What he’s saying is that popular entertainment, despite the usual tropes about superficial and unappreciative Millenials, has not “ruined” the young generation, but rather exposed and given near-infinite access to a basic human longing.
We are a society of escapists — and what’s wrong with that? Why do we judge the middle-aged gamer living in their parents’ basement? Why do we cringe at geeky, endearing fans of manga and anime? Why did so many Americans flock to the theatres to watch a documentary about Mr. Rogers?
And are fiction readers exempt from this social stigma, just because books are seen as brainier and more valuable compared to other forms of popular entertainment? The universal acclaim of achingly sincere and nerdy novels like Kavalier & Clay and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which the focus of “high-brow” literary fiction is the meaning of heartbreaking passion and naïve love, and the wavering cultural interest in postmodernist irony, suggests to me that we fiction devotees are nothing special.
Medium’s August series on the theme of escape in our daily lives, the endless posts about superheroes and loneliness and fantasy, and the persistent recurrence of the idea of home and the absence of home, tell me that “escapism” is indeed essential to the human condition.
As Kornblum says in Kavalier & Clay: “Forget about what you are escaping from…Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”
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