jacob graham’s Reviews > No Time To Spare: Thinking About What Matters > Status Update

3/3: ". . . But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is escapism an accusation of?"

2/3: ". . . Fantastic literature, like all the verbal arts, must satisfy the intellectual as well as the aesthetic faculty . . .

As for the charge of escapism, what does 'escape' mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies . . ."

1/3: "Those who dismiss fantasy less fiercely, from a less absolutist stance, usually call it dreaming, or escapism.

Dream and fantastic literature are related only on a very deep, usually inaccessible level of the mind. Dream is free of intellectual control; its narratives are irrational and unstable, and its aesthetic value is mostly accidental . . ."

4/4: ". . . Fantasy not only asks 'What if things didn't go on just as they do?' but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.

So here imagination and fundamentalism come into conflict."

3/4: ". . . Subversion doesn't suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that things are as they have to be . . ."

2/4: ". . . Fantasy isn't meliorative. The happy ending, however enjoyable to the reader, applies to the characters only; this is fiction, not prediction & not prescription.

'It doesn't have to be the way it is' is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to 'being real.' Yet it is a subversive statement . . ."

1/4: "'It doesn't have to be the way it is.' That is what fantasy says. It doesn't say, 'Anything goes'—that's irresponsibility . . . Fantasy doesn't say, 'Nothing is'—that's nihilism. And it doesn't say, 'It ought to be this way'—that's utopianism, a different enterprise . . ."

"Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it."

"Fear is seldom wise and never kind."