Silly Escapism

I was talking to a guy who was reading a genre book that I enjoyed. He also enjoyed it but had to caveat that enjoyment by explaining that he enjoyed it as silly escapism (as opposed to serious literature, presumably).

As someone who reads just about every genre, including literary fiction, I feel kind of sorry for people who 1) exclude genre fiction, because they're missing a lot of good work; or 2) have somehow been indoctrinated into thinking that 'serious' literary fiction is the only thing they can like without feeling self-conscious.

Have any of you genre readers encountered this attitude? I don't mean among literary snobs but actual readers of genre fiction who seem to be embarrassed about it.

 

Have not encountered it, but I'm not exactly a socialite.

It seems strange. To me, escapism is as essntial as art and beauty. It brings us out of this sometimes dreary existance into worlds where our fantasy and imagination can run wild. Not being able to see the potential of unhindered creativity seems like a flaw to me.

 

Quite often. It doesn’t bother me when someone makes those noises, but it usually indicates that they won’t (or can’t) offer interesting insights and analysis about the story.

I’ve never subscribed to the “popcorn read” viewpoint. More power to those that do, but that’s a suit that doesn’t fit me. I’m firmly in the camp that if I really like a story, then I‘m certain I have good reasons for doing so. And further, all of those stories are worthy of analysis. And all were produced with impressive talent and artistry.

 

People are funny creatures, afraid we'll be judged in a thousand different ways and found wanting. Announcing awareness of one's chosen reading material as "silly escapism" is a shot over the bow, warning would-be critics against passing judgement on one's intellect based on one's latest reading material. To hell with that. People who preen themselves on critiquing the reading habits and preferences of others are not worth trying to impress.

 

Good trash novels and wonderfully terrible movies are two of life's greatest pleasures.

 

Escapism has its place, certainly. It's an important part of entertainment - sort of like reading P.G. Wodehouse or something by Brandon Sanderson. Sometimes you just want good fun and be told a story. Sometimes writing is deeper than just what the surface says, and can tell you a lot about other people or the way the world works - that's fine too, just more complex and intellectually interesting I guess.

But there is that perception that you would be much better served by reading 'real' literature, and 'genre fiction' (I'll get to what I think this means) is in some way not serious. There's a few points I'd like to make on this. And yes being embarrassed about genre reading is something I've noticed too.

Yes, I do think reading the best literature would benefit a writer more. I think if you're serious about writing as an artform it just makes sense to do so. You wouldn't try to paint without having at least an awareness of the widest possible set of reference points.

Same with writing. You learn more about technique, style, character and everything by reading as widely and as deeply as possible. That to me seems just obviously true. If you don't read good stuff you have little to compare something new too - and so can't really see beyond how it affected you personally. Writing is fundamentally, above everything else, a form of communication. Reading what's considered good, and knowing why it has that reputation, you see something of what a lot more people have found they think is good too.

People then assume a lot of things about 'good' works of fiction, more than they actually read them - or (which is even worse) they have been told either by society or by a really bad teacher that a classic, say Shakespeare, is boring or difficult to understand. And so for something to be serious, it must be grounded and boring. Anyone who has actually read Shakespeare honestly can see ... the dude was a fratboy, there are so many jokes and stories that could easily be adapted into dumb teen comedies. And they often are. Yes it's a struggle at first because the vocabulary is so old fashioned, but stick with it and it gets easier.

Also, looking at the fountainhead of western literature, Homer, that's nothing if not a giant fantasy story about an adventure. People try to slot the different events to actual places, like the Lotus Eaters are apparently in Libya or something - it's pretty pointless to do this. It's just pure fantasy and I think was supposed to be so in the same way today people identify with Hogwarts houses or something. We know Hogwarts isn't real, it's escapism (I also think in The Odyssey it's a double kind of escapism, both for the audience and Odysseus himself, but that's a total tangent).

This can lead to people being very defensive of their genre. 'Oh, I read fantasy only. I don't read any of that snobby stuff'. And that sort of attitude is a massive shame, but it's also I think pretty limiting - do that and you run the risk of not seeing the complexity of your own genre, really. I'm a big Tolkien fan, and my appreciation for him has only deepened after reading the Medieval and Norse sources that inspired him, or the Christian philosophies he was a firm believer in and interwoven into his creation. Eru-Illuvitar is God and Melkor/Morgoth is Satan. I don't think Tolkien is the be-all, end-all of fantasy, to be honest I do resent how long and deeply his shadow has been cast over the genre, but it is what it is - and there's always other kinds of fantasy too. Magical realism, or stuff like Lord Dunsany or something like that.

But Tolkien's legendarium has (mostly because of the Peter Jackson films, let's be honest) acquired a sort of legitimacy now that I don't think is afforded to something like Discworld, which is also great. People who are embarrassed about 'genre' fiction, in my experience it's mostly from fans of or readers of fantasy.

I don't really tend to see it for sci-fi, maybe for the weirder stuff I guess, and really haven't noticed it around horror at all. In my experience when you are reading Stephen King or something no one bats an eye, but read something like Earthsea (which is I think better than most of King's output, especially The Tommyknockers - oh wow that book is a bad one) and there is a little sense of shame. 'Oh yeah, it's a fantasy about a world that ...' yeah. There's a stigma around it and I'm not exactly sure where it's come from. There's fantasy out there I think is brilliant, there's fantasy I think is not even worth reading - but that's the same with literally any other genre.

But that reluctance to say you like fantasy might only be in your own head too.

Sure there's always going to be 'snobs' who say anything that isn't canonical literature is trash - but that's just pretentious. I'll never forget one guy who told me Shakespeare never wrote a bum joke, and then when I said there is a character that is mostly in there just for a bum joke in Midsummer Night's Dream - I never got an answer to that. Pretentious people are pretentious - they think what others tell them to think because it makes them feel superior. That's bad because they'll never understand writing or fiction as anything other than a points-scoring exercise, and then it isn't art - that's just a brag. And bragging is really boring.

But sticking to one genre and being ashamed of your taste, and dismissing 'literary' stuff is just as bad. It isn't being open to different things - and limits your horizons. You might like your horizons (hey, do whatever you want) but you might also be missing out on something you like too. It's like being in a really nice valley with a really cool and fun maze to run around in. Maybe the next valley along has a waterpark?

Sure reading something considered 'great' can be daunting. Even difficult to understand at first. Stick with them and you do get more out of them, or if it's something like Homer - maybe you just don't like the translation? Stanley Lombardo has done translations that I've heard are quite 'hip' and easier to get into and just read for its own sake. Dante ... well, Dante just fell in place for me for whatever reason, but boy was I glad I had a copy with copious amounts of notes too! But neither Homer or Dante need to be serious, heavy literature. I'll never forget the images in my head when reading Inferno for the first time. I'd always liked games like DooM and stuff, and I just became lost in the adventure around the gloomy pits of Hell. It still feels like that to me now, and I first read it a decade ago. Beowulf feels like The Hobbit to me, or Skyrim, and it's a really fun story of a hero in the frozen European north with vikings and a dragon. That's COOL!.

Escapism has its place, and an important one - but maybe you shouldn't always look to just escape reality either. After all, it is where you live.

 

I agree with a lot of what you say here. Especially this:

But I also disagree with some of it. I realize I probably won't change your mind, or maybe anyone else's either, but I want to say a few things you made me think of.

I do see a deeper importance to the Odyssey and Beowulf. They're powerful myths of the kind that cultures are founded on. The hero myth is one of the most important and foundational, especially in forming societies, because the need to be courageous and make necessary sacrifices is exactly what's needed in such a situation. Classical societies are founded on traditional values, and need to be, otherwise they can't grow strong. A classical period is a period of growth, followed by a decadent period when the values flip the other way and heroism is seen as toxic. That's when the society is dissolving.

The book I'm currently reading (Individuation in Fairy Tales by Marie Louise von Franz) examines the idea that most fairy tales and even most folk tales are built on some aspect of Individuation, the psychological process of growth out of childhood (or arrested childhood) toward more complete maturity. It's a harrowing process, often exemplified by the hero's journey, because in order to grow you need to overcome your innocent naivety, and that means you need to face and come to terms with the things you're afraid of, that are now seen as monsters or dragons. It's terrifying to do this, but if you're successful you win the gold or some boon from the gods. And what this means in reality is that when you face your shadow and successfully integrate parts of it, you develop psychological resilience and reach what was once called a higher spiritual level. Now of course it's called psychological development or mental health. People need examples of this in their literature, and that literature becomes the glue that holds the society together through shared values. When the literature and the ideas it exemplifies are lost (when the myths of the culture are devalued) the society is done. I think that makes those kinds of tales extremely important. And of course there's a great deal of that as well in Tolkien—it's essentially an epic hero's journey for Frodo, and a much smaller and simpler one for Bilbo before him. But they're prosaic (written in prose) and have enough detail to show their normal daily lives, which makes them stories rather than tales, so they're fundamentally different from a myth or fairy tale. Those are pared way down and not concerned with what anything looks like or people's daily lives. Cultures are founded on myths, not on stories, and the myths need to be powerful enough that almost everyone is gripped by them.

 

I agree far more with your second paragraph than your first. Being honest I don't think its right or fair to say classical world was a period of growth opposed to a period of decadence that led to the fall of the western empire - but that's totally beside this thread's focus on writing. And yeah, it's very true that stuff like The Odyssey, Beowulf were not only reflective of the cultures they came out of, they were also used to instruct those values too. Probably true of Beowulf, it certainly was true of Homer.

But I also think there's more going on than just that. Sure Odysseus is a hero, and he has qualities of 'arate' like he's a brilliant liar and he's praised for it - but he's also suffering from what appears to be PTSD. When the blind poet is reciting the story of Troy in the court of the Phaeacians, Odysseus has a hard time hearing it, it's like he's about to burst into tears remembering it. The Trojan war, I think, haunts Odysseus and his journey getting home. He takes so long because all these things keep stopping him, like the Lotus Eaters, and I take their importance to be the temptation of the use of drugs to escape the horrors of a soldier's past - as just one example. There's a really good book on this called Odysseus in America, I forget his name but some academic compared GIs returning home from Vietnam to the homecoming in the Odyssey and found interesting parallels.

And then look at when Odysseus' journey into the underworld and meets Achilles - the hero of the Iliad, the perfect fighter ... and Achilles says 'Yeah, I'd rather be a slave and alive than lord here over the dead. Death in battle isn't worth it'. That's not valuing heroism, that's pathos. That's one of the reasons we tend to think The Iliad and the Odyssey were written by two different people, the cultural views they seem to be coming from are similar but they are not the same. Odysseus is the kind of guy Achilles really doesn't like - Achilles says in The Iliad something like 'hateful to me is the man who says one thing and thinks another'.

It might be anachronistic, it probably is, but The Iliad could easily be read as very anti-war too, even though it's a really good war story. But then taking the Aeneid, Aeneas is at first glance a good Roman. He's heroic, he's resourceful - if anything describes him it'd be the words semper fi, but Virgil might have also been using him to critique Augustus. It's an open question if it's extolling 'good Roman values' or quietly making fun of them.

In Beowulf: Grendel being the lesser of the monster, then Grendel's mother who is even worse, then a dragon I don't even think is gendered. I'd have to read the Old English to remember, but that is pretty reflective of a patriarchal society if you take the dragon to be a metaphor for evil - Beowulf did come from a Christian society after all but one that still honoured the pagan past. But while the poem is Christian, it does glorify, or sympathise, with the people they no longer are.

You're right that both are central myths in their cultures, that's certainly a big part of why they were kept around or recorded in the way that they are, but also they are escapism too. It's the story that makes them fun to read/hear.

 

Ok, I didn't explain it clearly enough and you misunderstood my meaning. I wasn't talking about "The Classical Period," but about the cycle of classical and decadent periods in a culture. All cultures go through them, and so do all individuals at various times. It's an up and down cycle thing. What's known as a society's 'classical' periods are periods when it values traditional virtues like heroism, masculinity for men and femininity for women, etc. Generally a society will go through many of these cycles over the course of its history. There was classical Athens, and then it was followed by Hellenism, a decadent period when those heroic values got overturned and the opposite came to the surface. It's a necessary turning—what was undervalued before rises to the surface, violently if necessary, and pushes the other values down for a time. But it's a well-known fact (as far as I know) that during a classical or traditional period a society becomes wealthier and stronger. And during a period of decadence these things erode away because other things are valued instead.

In a classical period things like strength, beauty, grace, and health are valued, and in a decadent period it's their opposites—there's a huge swing toward compassion for the weak, poor and oppressed, beauty is devalued, the general population becomes possessed of vices rather than virtues etc. Paintings and statues start to commemorate the weak, the sick, the elderly, and the losers rather than the winners, of for instance the Olympics. A time of pathos rather than worship of strength.

I'm probably using divisive terminology, but this is the way I learned it. I'm sure there are other terms for it (like traditional rather than classical). I'm not aware of a better term for a decadent period—a period of decline? It's just the way the pendulum swings for an entire culture. There are up times and down times. I suppose you could call it a masculine period followed by a feminine period. I suppose the terms I was using were created by a masculine society lol. But it's very much a Yin/Yang kind of cyclical thing, with opposites on each side, and it keeps rotating gradually.

The things that keep stopping Odysseus on his journey are the elements of his inner Shadow or Anima that he must face and come to terms with. I think Circe is a shadow anima figure, but she does help him in the end, teaching him some of her magic and letting him escape her island. Of course I'm discussing it all from a psychological viewpoint, both individually and collectively.

Things like him showing contempt for Achilles don't mean it isn't a hero's myth. Ancient Greece was brutal! What was considered heroism then included having contempt for the weak. I mean, he slaughtered the suitors! He was exemplifying a very harsh masculinity, which apparently was what they needed at that time in order to survive against all their rivals. Or at least he exemplified some aspects of it. Not every heroic myth is going to show exactly the same take on heroism. They'll all have their flaws, and those are important. I can't say much more about it, I haven't read or done a deep analysis on the Odyssey, though it would be fascinating.

But of course when he was in the underworld that was the deepest part of the downward movement of the journey—what Campbell called the deepest cave I think—and he had to face some of his most profound shadow elements. Again, I don't know what they represent, but I'd assume somehow Achilles was either showing him what he was missing, what he needed in order to be more complete or something along those lines. Hey, I'm not an expert on this stuff! But you seem to be talking about it on a very different level than I am. I'm discussing the archetypal or mythical aspects of it while you seem concerned with individual events at a more surface level. But I should probably stop trying to get people to think about this stuff, most people probably think I'm just a nut case and have no idea what I'm talking about

 

Another thing I've seen these opposed sets of values called is the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo represents the strong masculine values of classicism, and Dionysus the dark shadow side of that, its opposite. Apollo is brilliant light and almost blinding clarity, Dionysus is about the dissolving of boundaries, darkness, drunken revelry, and the mass hysteria of the maenads leading to the mutilation and death of a worshipper standing in for the god (at least ritualistically).

Both of these are necessary parts of the cycle, for an individual or a society, and both correct the problems of the other. But either in extremity becomes very destructive, and you don't want to remain in either one for too long. After a while you need to flip to the other one, and hopefully not go too far into it, or that one will start destroying you. Ideally a society can find the balance point and remain there for long periods of time, but balance is a hard thing to maintain, and we do have a tendency toward extremism unfortunately.

 

Sorry, this is getting really off topic (my fault as usual). I need to quit trying to get people on writing forums to understand mythical or religious thinking through a psychological lens. It's a losing battle.

 

Ah, ok, I'm understanding what you mean now. Like there are golden ages and then declines. I think it's enough to say I myself don't hold to such interpretations of history and leave it there, since the thread is talking about escapism as a part of fiction. If you want to talk about this more we could make a separate thread or PM me or something.

I think I'm just coming at it from a different perspective as I take the whole of The Odyssey as being a metaphor for a coming to terms with trauma in at least one respect. Of course there's more going on than just that, but it's one big part I think is often overlooked. Like yes Odysseus kills the suiters, but he's also tested by his wife when she refers to the marriage bed and how it was made. That has nothing to do with his psychological state - and sure The Odyssey isn't just about Odysseus. It is, as you're suggesting, about arate more broadly.

My point on that, and I'm sorry if my post didn't emphasise it enough, is that the arate of The Iliad and The Odyssey are similar but critically different - and so can't just be extolling the best of a society. They are questioning it too, and encouraging the readers/audience to question it. And life being what it is, everyone's going to have different ideas on that. Just like other things, like the use of heroic myths. Like, sure, you can say that the (to use your term) 'classic era' of ancient greece was heroic and brutal, and it certainly was - but it's also the culture that invented medicine. Societies are complex things and all that.

But that relates back to my ultimate point. Great literature like Homer are not just good fun stories - they are things we can have conversations like this about too. Canonical writing is there because they are time-tested against everything else I guess, and if literature was just philosophical expoundings we wouldn't be talking about Homer but Nietzsche or Descartes and people like that. So restricting yourself to genre fiction is a shame, just like restricting yourself to 'great writing'.

 

Nah, I'm not up for something that I'm afraid would grow to massive proportions. I can see I need to work on my terminology before I bring this stuff up again. I think that would make it a lot more palatable to everyone involved.

My main point is that it's a myth, by which I mean it's an important founding story for the people of ancient Greece, of nearly religious importance. Or maybe it is a part of their religion, it does involve some of their gods. I suppose it really is religious, but then most myths are. And both religious stories and myths (and most fairy tales as well) are products of psychology, of the unconscious grappling with the problems the culture is facing at the time. So I'm discussing it as myth and as psychology. You may well be right it also indicates PTSD or something similar. I don't know, I've never considered it from that perspective. I trust you're right about it, but I don't think that aspect of it really fits its mythical status. Maybe it does, who knows? I mean ultimately, what I'm discovering is that myth and religion were early versions of psychology and philosophy, among other things.

But I'm ready to let it go. At any rate, it's been a fun discussion, a nice little flurry where both of us got to write up big long posts filled with our ideas and theories and the like. And that's always a good day!

 

I don't think your terminology was divisive or anything - I didn't understand what you meant because I'd never seen things put in that way before. So honestly, thanks for clarifying.

Yeah the Homeric texts had a religious role, and that is closely related to the bedrock of their culture. The Greeks being polytheists as I understand it respected all gods and would even worship non-Greek gods on the chance of not offending them, but I'll admit that's not something I know a lot about. You could sat religion is either an early version, or a combination of psychology and philosophy but I am looking at Homer more as like a contemporary work of literature.

And yeah it was a fun discussion. I enjoyed it. It's nice to talk to interested and intelligent people.