Escapism as reader-responsibility
For my SF class, we read this blog post in which the author argues against the negative depiction of escapist fiction in any genre or media, but most specifically speculative poetry. My response wandered a bit, but I thought I’d add it here, since I felt it was almost certainly lost on a forum where there is no intercommunication. So, my random argument that “escapism” is a style of writing that grew out of the reading public’s habit of approaching materials in an escapist manner:
First off, I found it distracting that the author shifted from talking about works that allow the reader to escape into them to talking about works that are about somebody escaping. Not the same thing. I feel that the issue here anyways isn’t really something that is primarily a writer’s issue. Escapism is a reader’s issue. It is a way to approach a work. While at times a challenging undertaking, one can read almost any work in an escapist manner. I myself am guilty of reading Othello in an escapist fashion: I read it for the deliciously diabolical character of Iago and enjoy his mental acrobatics without allowing myself to get mired in the issues of jealousy and racism and whatnot. It may not be so easy to accomplish with other works that are staunchly against being read as escapism. I imagine that it is difficult to read, say, Heart of Darkness in an escapist fashion, but it is possible that it may be pleasantly escapist for someone.
Writers are also readers. Many writers also write in a way that will encourage readers to read their books (with style, content, characters, logical progression of events, that sort of thing). With these two things in mind, it is logical that writers would write works that facilitate being read as escapist. If people are going to read it as escapist anyways, where is the point in making it a deep psychological condemnation of mankind? Or, why not do both? If an author throws in some aspects that encourage escapist reading: absurd creatures, exciting color schemes, attractive people, melodrama, he or she can also work in other things, social commentary, etc. Hominids comes to mind, with the attractive French-Canadian woman. Oh, pardon, she was a scientist…. who stripped down to her (lacy) underwear within the first 10 pages of the novel, neatly signaling to readers “Hey, I’ve got some good escapist elements here! You may have to sift through my ravings against humanity, but there are probably breasts in here! Almost certainly!” The fact that he reneges on this promise is of no account.
So we have works come about that are written to focus on the huge market for escapist reading: the old pulp works that our author was trying offhandedly to defend, and the many many sf works out there that focus mainly on the elements mentioned above (possibly without the color scheme, but on that note, anyone seen the Avatar preview? Just how blue do these aliens have to be before we stop taking them seriously?). Expectations of escapist readings effect the plot of the story, as well. We all knew that Bella was going to end up with Edward. Or Jacob. Or at least die dramatically due to her refusal to chose between the two. I haven’t even read them and I can tell you that much was bound to happen. She wasn’t going to get sick of this nonsense and go get a sane life as a bank teller or an insurance agent. I hear that Meyers even offers a solution for the age-old problem of what to do with the left-over lover once the love triangle is resolved. If you don’t know, ask your friends. It’s pretty hilarious, in a creepy sort of way.
Works, of course, that are trying to dissuade people from reading them in an escapist manner (the author uses the term “realist” here, but I’m not sure if his sense is immediately accessible) will try to avoid things that we as readers know trigger an escapist reading: breasts, pretty people, happy endings, that sort of thing. (Okay, I’m being somewhat flippant here, but really we all know what our escapist stories have in them and there is probably an enormous amount of overlap that may or may not surprise you.) Anyways, let’s call the reading approach opposite “escapism”… “illuminating”. It isn’t the best, but “intellectual” has some of the wrong connotations, so illuminating will have to do. By that, I mean that the reader is approaching the text with the intent to acquire some insight, to determine and evaluate the author’s stand on a variety of different issues. This is generally the sort of reading encouraged in our literature classes. Again, one can approach almost any text with this sort of reading, hence our sf class, however, it is again facilitated or made difficult by the contents of the text.
To conclude, I am claiming that “escapism” is first and foremost a reader’s action, not the writer’s. Escapist works are those that aim to be read in this fashion, but terming any book strictly escapist or not escapist is problematic because there is always that one smartypants (or occasionally, lots) who says “yeah, well, I can watch Star Trek for its deep anxieties over whiteness and the postcolonial societies that it grew out of.” Or there are troublemakers like myself who say “Yes, I know Othello is a tragedy concerning a man’s destruction of himself and those he loves because of his failure to think twice about his actions, but, really, I just read it for Iago. He’s so dreamy. They should totally make a new movie of Othello with Iago played by Hugh Jackman.”
Maybe I need some disposable dishes too…
Spent too long washing dishes, not done yet. And now I’m supposed to be curled up with my laptop and another cup of tea (loose-leaf Irish breakfast goes well with lots of milk and sugar)… but I’ve finished my tea and my internet keeps disappearing. Oh well. The boyfriend fell asleep muttering something about how he needed to go up to campus and get work done, and how I was keeping him from getting said work done. Hmm. I woke him up two hours ago and he grumbled for about an hour and fell asleep again. Hence the dishes, tea, and laptop.
I was thinking about Walt Whitman again. In my first readthrough of Drum-Taps, I noticed numerous poems using the image of the moon and now I’m certain though it be madness, yet there is sense in it. The first poems in the cycle, notably “First O Songs for a Prelude” and, obviously, “Song of the Banner at Daybreak”, are set at daybreak. The voice of the Banner even says “out of the night emerging for good” (425 in Library of America College Edition, Whitman: Poetry and Prose).
In “Bivouac on a Mountain Side”, Whitman turns his attention to the night: “And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars” (435). This, however, seems to be part of a mini-poetic-cycle about the soldiers’ days and nights, alternating for four short poems: “Calvalry Crossing a Ford”, “Bivouac on a Mountain Side”, “An Army Corps on the March”, and “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame”. The last poem brings in the notion that nighttime is when one reflects on death and memories, a notion with which Whitman ends the next poem “Come Up From The Fields Father”: “In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,/O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,/ To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son” (438). He then immerses a poem entirely in night, “Vigil Strange I Kept On the Field One Night”, a soldier keeping wake for a younger soldier (with Whitman, I am loathe to take the mention of “father” and “son” too literally), not grieving necessarily but tenderly remembering, until a dawn burial. “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown” depicts a nighttime hospital set up in a church with little light.
The moon makes its first appearence in “Dirge for Two Veterans”. The speaker calls it “silvery” “beautiful” “ghastly” “immense”, a “sorrowful vast phantom”, “some mother’s large transparent face”. Now the full moon is linked with the tenderness of nighttime grief and burial. “Look Down Fair Moon” adds a sense that the moon’s light hallows the dead bodies on the fields. This is echoed in “Reconciliation” in which the moon is seen as the sister of Death, and together they wash “this soil’d world” (453). “Lo Victress on the Peaks” has Whitman distancing himself from the glory-mongering attitude of his earlier poems, offering up his poems of “night’s darkness and blood-dripping wounds,/And psalms of the dead” (455)
The final poem of Drum-Taps, fittingly enough, brings the cycle back into daylight with the return of “forenoon air” and the final line “But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs” (458).
While this progression from daybreak to hot sun to cool night to day again may be an expression of the Civil War as a descent into blackness, a nightmare, etc., I feel that nighttime and the Civil War do not correspond exactly. I think rather that the connection is between night and death/memory. Whitman seemed a daytime poet before these writings, all his poems taking place in full day and bright sun. With his hospital visits and understanding of war and death which that gave him, Whitman develops a new appreciation for the solitude of nighttime and the power of the emotions he saw felt by dying soldiers in the night and felt himself for dead comrades. Nighttime makes it easy for Whitman’s tender and compassionate poet to emerge.
I’ll end with a quote from Whitman’s “To a Certain Civilian”:
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.
