FifthView
Vala
Is there something wrong with reading and writing fantasy as an escape from the real world? I don't understand why that keeps coming up. Everyone is drawn to art for different reasons and there's no right or wrong.
But it can be a mixture of reasons, no? I love being entertained by literature but I also like to learn things. I don't think it needs to be one way or another.
It may be—and I cannot know, because I am not in your mind—that what you and I experience when reading fantasy is quite the same thing, but we have different ways of interpreting or remembering it after we put the book down.
I do not like the idea of a clean break between entertainment and learning, as some have implied in this discussion. Maybe we split concepts in order to come to a better understanding of them when discussing them; but then the tendency to continue to separate them obscures the reality of our experience.
Montaigne in his essay "Apology for Raymond Sebond," described two types of skeptic. One believes we can know absolutely nothing—and perversely actually knows this, or is dogmatic about it! The other, which he called the Pyrrhonian, merely suspends judgment and enjoys the chase, the search for knowledge, which must begin with the thought that we are lacking knowledge and would be hindered by any belief that we have actually found it:
Democritus, having eaten at his table some figs that tasted of honey, immediately began to seek out in his mind whence came this unaccustomed sweetness; and to clear up the matter, he was about to get up from the table to see the situation of the place where these figs had been gathered. His maidservant, having heard the cause of this stir, laughed and told him not to trouble himself about it, for the reason was that she had put them in a vessel where there had been some honey. He was vexed that she had deprived him of this occasion for research and robbed him of matter for curiosity: "Go along," he said to her, "you have made me angry; I will not for all that give up seeking the cause as if it was a natural one." And he willfully sought and found some "true" reason for a false and supposed effect.
This story of a great and famous philosopher shows us very clearly this passion for study, which keeps us amused in pursuit of things of whose gain we have no hope. Plutarch tells a similar case of someone who did not want to be enlightened about something he was in doubt about, so as not to lose the pleasure of seeking it; like the other who did not want his doctor to rid him of the thirst of the fever, so as not to lose the pleasure of quenching it by drinking....
Just as in all feeding there is often the pleasure alone, and not all we take that is pleasant is always nutritious and healthful; so what our mind derives from learning does not fail to be voluptuous even though it be neither nourishing nor salutary.
This story of a great and famous philosopher shows us very clearly this passion for study, which keeps us amused in pursuit of things of whose gain we have no hope. Plutarch tells a similar case of someone who did not want to be enlightened about something he was in doubt about, so as not to lose the pleasure of seeking it; like the other who did not want his doctor to rid him of the thirst of the fever, so as not to lose the pleasure of quenching it by drinking....
Just as in all feeding there is often the pleasure alone, and not all we take that is pleasant is always nutritious and healthful; so what our mind derives from learning does not fail to be voluptuous even though it be neither nourishing nor salutary.
For me, there is that entertainment value, that pleasure, in searching out these various potential realities, as I described in my previous comment, even if my search is often in vain in the sense that I'll not suddenly find myself actually surrounded by all that exists in those fantasy worlds and/or am unable to put into practice or use whatever I find there.
At the same time, those things like loyalty, love, bravery, dedication, etc., that we can find in the fantasy story are not things I consider to be absent from our own world. Nimue has a point in describing the way that fantasy can allow us to "heighten emotion, beauty, thematic ideals, and character grandeur." But these are not unreal things; they exist in our own world even if we are often blind to this fact. That bit I quoted above describes people who were once alive and breathing in our world, Democritus, his maidservant, Plutarch; and although this might actually be a fictionalized account or idealized account (I, not having lived at that time, cannot know), it describes something fully possible in our own world and at the same time reads almost as if it's a passage from some fantasy novel. Just change the names and have someone else tell it.
For me, this desire to learn, this entertainment value in that search, is fully possible within our own world, and I can feel myself "transported" within this real world of ours as easily as I can experience that effect by reading a fantasy novel. But I put that word in quotes, just as I put "escape" in quotes earlier, because for me those are figurative descriptions. Maybe the mind is distracted, diverted from contemplating the things around us, in this pursuit of discovery, and that is the "escape" people keep mentioning. But my own mind experiences that sort of thing throughout the day while I am awake, even if I am not reading. Sometimes my mind is on some new exoplanet just discovered, sometimes it's thinking about those two 14-year-old boys lost off the coast of Florida nine months ago or some other dramatic and tragic (or happy, serendipitous) event that happened on our own real Earth. Sometimes it's on the birds I watch, or my cat, or my family doing whatever elsewhere while I'm taking an extra long break at work.
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