Originally published at Cogs & Neurons. You can comment here or there.
As usual it takes me about two weeks after reading something to come up with an original thought, so I have completely lost the link to the article that caused all the subsequent thoughts, so I apologize for that.
Having lost the link I can’t go point by point, and I’m not sure even if I could. I think there were some good points in the arguments as well as bad, and I don’t want this to turn into a swipe at someone behind there back. But one point that was definitely made and that I definitely take issue with was that the assertion it was OK for books to be purely escapist, and that tackling politics in novels was not necessarily a good thing, and could even spoil a book (the advocate for politics in fantasy novels in question was China Mieville, whose particular brand of politics is more contentious than most).
And the vast hole in the argument for pure escapism over political content was the author’s failure to realize that escapism is political too.
This, I think, can manifest in a couple of ways. Firstly, the politics of the author can be so closely aligned with the readers that the reader simply doesn’t notice them. So while the book may be political, it doesn’t challenge that particular readers worldview, doesn’t cause them to ask themselves any questions, and the politics passes them by. These books, I suspect, as in the minority,
More difficult to spot, perhaps, are the books which do not directly deal with political matters. Because the subject is not directly tackled it appears to be left alone. But any novel supports a particular worldview. Even the innocent phrases slipped into paragraphs can be loaded with political content–for example”men and women” is gender biased, with its assumption that men go first, yet it’s such a common phrase that few are going to see it and think about it (I’m not claiming to be unnaturally aware of political biases in text here, btw, anyone who knows me knows I blunder as much as the next woman or man). But the politics is there in every text. It’s whether we acknowledge it or not.
And that comes to the intent with which we read books. It is certainly possible to read with the intent of escaping from our daily lives, to read with the intent of ignoring the political content of any book. And those readers are likely to pick books that naturally fit their worldview most closely, that challenge them the least, that draw attention to their politics the least. But again, this doesn’t mean that the books are apolitical.
And, of course, reading with the intent of ignoring the political content of a book, is a political decision too. It’s essentially an acquiescence, an acknowledgment of a particular worldview, a decision to uphold it, to do nothing. And that’s a legitimate decision, but it’s a political one.
And I probably should let things lie there, but one last thing bother me, which is, the feeling that one needs to escape seems to imply a dissatisfaction with the status quo. The reader feels the need to escape something. But rather than engage with whatever the problem is, they’re choosing to disengage, they’re acquiescing to the situation, allowing it to continue. This is the conciliatory role Tolkein argued for fantasy (whether his own works are conciliatory or not I would debate, but he certainly argued that fantasy should fulfill that function) and it is the weakest position fiction can take. It is to say that the sole purpose of fiction is to entertain.
Yes, fiction to be successful by ANY measure, must entertain, but that is also the least it must do. That is the price of entry. But it can do more much more. And just because fiction challenges us, doesn’t mean that it cannot be entertaining as well.