Fantasy and science fiction are both exceptionally popular genres, in books and on the screen (big and small). Those of us who enjoy stories set in places like Middle-earth, Narnia, or Hogwarts, or featuring superheroes or starships, have probably come across a dismissive reaction at some point: the attitude that it’s all silly and childish, an immature, even anti-social preference. We should attend to “real life” and not escape into imaginary worlds.
It’s worth pausing to consider this criticism. Is it wrong to immerse ourselves in stories set in places that never existed and delight in adventures that could never happen? Does it weaken our ability to deal with the difficulties of the world we actually live in or confuse our moral sense? Is the experience offered by fantasy and science fiction really just “escapism,” a kind of moral and emotional truancy?
As the savvy reader might anticipate, my answer is no. However, it’s a genuinely important question. If fantasy and science fiction really did encourage a flight from reality, or a refusal to recognize or engage with the serious issues of “real life,” it would be a serious concern.
Let’s consider a basic point about escapism: namely, that it is not characteristic of any particular genre. Stories that are set in the “real world” may offer to the reader or viewer a perspective of the world that is as unrealistic in its own way as any fantasy with elves and magic. We may be drawn into imagined worlds in which violence solves problems rather than causes them. As viewers or readers, we may be given a voyeuristic look into a world of the rich and powerful, where sexual intrigues happen without the messy consequences of broken hearts, shattered families, and betrayed friends. There’s a whole subset of fiction and film in which women redeem abusive men by the power of their love.
The reader who escapes into a good fantasy does not return to “real life” unchanged.
In his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” C.S. Lewis contrasts the effect on the reader of fantasy stories and the kind of stories that present wish fulfillment in a more realistic setting:
There is no doubt that both arouse, and imaginatively satisfy, wishes. We long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairy land. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl, or the lucky boy or girl who discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage. But the two longings are very different. The second, especially when directed on something so close as school life, is ravenous and deadly serious. Its fulfilment on the level of imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration.
Lewis goes on to note that it is the “superficially realistic” fantasy that is dangerous: “stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes—things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance.”
Here we have actual escapism: an indulgence in wish fulfillment that, when the book is closed or the film or the TV episode has come to an end, is likely to provoke envy, fruitless discontent, and a refusal to deal with the life and relationships a person really has. Superficially realistic, but escapist stories can give a gloss of excitement or normality to behavior that in real life is destructive, such as adultery, drug-taking, or abusive relationships. Fantasy and science fiction can be escapist in the negative sense, to be sure—but it would be a feature of bad fantasy, as it is a feature of bad storytelling of any genre or form.
By contrast, taking pleasure in the “escape” offered by a fantasy novel is not a mark of immaturity or shallowness—far from it. Depending on one’s circumstances, escape may be sensible or even heroic, just as it might be in “real life.” As J.R.R. Tolkien puts it, in his essay “On Fairy-stories,”
Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
The concept of escape means that we must recognize both something negative to be escaped from and something positive to be escaped into. The experience of other worlds, in fantasy and science fiction, is therefore at least potentially a constant dialogue with reality both as it is and as it could or should be. The reader who escapes into a good fantasy does not return to “real life” unchanged.
The imagined world gives the reader the opportunity to see things differently: to see what it’s like to live in a world with certain assumptions, certain ways of being. This is much more important than we may realize. Imaginative experiences help us to know what’s possible, and they help to shape what is desirable.
Consider, for instance, the assumptions about sexuality that are endemic to our current culture. We are bombarded with messages about sexuality that are in fact contradictory and incoherent. On the one hand, we are constantly told that sex is nothing more than an activity that one can take part in, if one enjoys it, in the manner in which one prefers. In this sense, sexual actions have little to no moral relevance; sex is just a sort of full-contact body sport, like tennis. If that’s the meaning of sex, it’s not surprising that people are confused about Catholic sexual ethics. Why be uptight about having multiple tennis partners? But despite the fact that the culture insists any particular sexual act is meaningless, the culture also insists that acting on one’s sexual impulses is absolutely central to defining who you are. If you’re not having sex, you’re a sad, pathetic, repressed excuse for a person.
No wonder, then, that Catholic teaching on human sexuality is not understood. The very idea that sexual acts are deeply meaningful, and yet that they don’t define you as a person, is utterly counter-intuitive to the modern culture. The idea of chastity in marriage, being faithful to one’s spouse, and chastity in single life, that one can be celibate and yet be joyful and full of life, is simply inconceivable. People in our modern culture don’t so much disagree with the Catholic ethos as much as they find it impossible to imagine that we can live this way and be happy.
What people can’t imagine, they can’t desire.
In this context, escape is of the greatest importance. Stories offer the opportunity to let readers and viewers look out a window and see something outside that dark prison cell. Stories can show what real faithfulness, love, and healthy sexuality look like. When the prisoner has begun truly to enjoy that imagined world, outside the prison walls, maybe, just maybe, he or she will begin to ask: Could it be a real world? Could I maybe escape? The story won’t convince the reader that the Catholic ethos is true, but it can make it worth finding out if it’s true.
What would this kind of story look like? It certainly won’t look like the romance fiction on the shelves of the Christian section in your local bookstore. That’s also escapist fiction, just on the clean end of the spectrum. The idea that one’s happiness depends on finding one’s soulmate (presupposing that one exists!) and that when one has found that person everything will be perfect is not harmless. Unrealistic expectations make for both unhappy marriages and unhappy single people.
Instead, stories that offer true escape out of darkness into health and wholeness will not sugarcoat relationships but will present love, marriage, family, and friendships as meaningful, desirable, life-giving things that come with difficulties and challenges. Whether the characters are humans or hobbits, whether the story is set in the twenty-first century or the twenty-fourth, is entirely irrelevant. These characters can show us something that we can desire and that we really can aim for in our own real lives. Tolkien does this in The Lord of the Rings. We have Eowyn and her unrequited, painful love for Aragorn, and later her mature love and marriage to Faramir. Most beautifully, we have Sam Gamgee and Rosie Cotton: don’t forget that the very last line of this great novel is Sam returning home to his wife and family. “Well, I’m back.”
The reader who escapes into a good story may well return to “real life” changed for the better.