The Duty to Escape

or: tolkien and le guin on escapist fantasy

The other night, I talked with a friend whose life had been radically different from mine in so many ways—they’re nearly twenty years younger than me and grew up in a household entirely unlike mine. We talked about how we both read books under our desks in class. Not school books, but escapist fantasy. Throughout middle school, I had a line across my forehead from where the edge of the desk pressed into my skin while I read books under the table.

I didn’t have a very good time in middle school. My two best friends had just moved away, and our middle class, mixed-income neighborhood had been bussed to a wealthier neighborhood in order to diversify the place. I went from having one bully, like I did in elementary school, to having roughly half the school joining in the abuse I suffered. (I really hate the dismissive way we talk about “bullying” as if routine physical and emotional abuse was something that did not deserve further analysis.)

Middle school was hell. As soon as I was free of it, once I was going to high school, I remember thinking to myself “why don’t I have many specific memories of the past few years of my life?”

Middle school was hell, but I survived, and maybe I survived because of Tolkien and Heinlein and Dumas and Jacques and Pierce and whatever trashy fantasy novels I got out of the library any given week. Maybe I survived because of the public library system. Maybe I survived because of the game shop that sold Dungeons & Dragons books—I didn’t have anyone to play with, but I spent plenty of time reading encyclopedias of worlds that have never existed.

As a result, I’ve never really questioned the importance of speculative fiction, of escapism. The ability to not-be-me for a while has always had a very strong value. By the end of high school, I found myself more drawn to “literature,” especially angsty European men like Camus and Hesse, but I never stopped reading fantasy along the way.

I don’t even mean, here, to elevate books above tv and video games and movies and other forms of escapism, though books have and will always have a special place in my heart.

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When I dropped out of college to ride freight trains and fight the government, I found myself, well, escaping. I broke free. I stopped paying rent, I stopped working a regular job. I lived in abandoned buildings and under bridges. Instead of rolling dice to pick locks, I learned to pick locks. Instead of treasure chests, there were dumpsters. Instead of an adventuring party, I had hitchhiking companions and I had an affinity group. I had the black bloc and I had forest defense.

But all the while, I kept reading books. No one devours novels like treesitters—what the fuck else are you going to do all day?

As a kid I read The Hobbit over and over again, but the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, I was an adult, maybe 20 or so, at a forest defense encampment in the pacific northwest. I had watch duty. Me and a friend sat all night behind a log beside a gravel logging road, tracking who came in and out and informing everyone if cops showed up to arrest us. My companion fell asleep right away, every night. I read Lord of the Rings by the light of a red headlamp. I wasn’t even escaping my escape, not really, but instead I was bolstering it. Here I was, living a life of adventure, reading about lives of adventure.

And yet, despite it all, I wasn’t sure that actually writing escapist stuff was a good use of time for a would-be revolutionary. Sure, I would stay up late reading (or playing video games, when I could find a place with enough electricity). But actually making that kind of thing? Wasn’t organizing more important? I wrote stories here and there, but I was shy to share them. What did writing, matter, when trees were falling in the forest and bombs were dropping overseas?

I wrote Ursula le Guin a letter. She was one of my heroes, a pacifist anarchist who’d written so many books that had meant so much to so many people. I wrote her a letter to her PO Box and said “Hi I’m a young anarchist fiction author and I’m wondering what role fiction has in social change. Can I interview you about it for a zine?”

And she emailed me back, and we corresponded for a while. I expanded the project from a zine to a book, in which I interviewed every anarchist fiction writer I could find at the time. And so I learned the role of fiction, especially speculative fiction, in social change. There are so many things: fiction asks questions better than it provides answers, thus challenging readers to reach their own conclusions; fiction gives us role models; fiction allows us to explore the idea that society could be fundamentally different (for better or worse).

But fiction also, well, it allows us to escape. And that isn’t wrong.

Although I don’t really write much like either of them, my two biggest role models as a fiction writer are Tolkien and Le Guin. And I’m lucky to say that they’ve both written somewhat extensively about the role of escapism.

In On Fairy Stories, Tolkien wrote:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. 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.

Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the “quisling” to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say “the land you loved is doomed” to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.

I love this. “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?” In numerous countries around the world, escaping from prison is not seen as in and of itself a crime. Any crimes you commit while trying to escape might be used against you, but trying to get out is just seen as natural, as human nature.

Of course as a middle school kid, I wanted to be anywhere but that rich suburb full of bullies. Of course I wanted to imagine myself on alien worlds, or in the past, or just even in some school in the real world that wasn’t my own school. That “escapism” didn’t stop me from addressing my own social problems, it allowed me to survive long enough to physically leave that situation.

Le Guin took what Tolkien wrote and expanded upon it, in a collection of essays called The Language of the Night:

The oldest argument against SF is both the shallowest and the profoundest: the assertion that SF, like all fantasy, is escapist.

This statement is shallow when made by the shallow. When an insurance broker tells you that SF doesn’t deal with the Real World, when a chemistry freshman informs you that Science has disproved Myth, when a censor suppresses a book because it doesn’t fit the canons of Socialist Realism, and so forth, that’s not criticism; it’s bigotry. If it’s worth answering, the best answer is given by Tolkien, author, critic, and scholar. Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

It is our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

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When I went and asked authors about the social utility of fiction, I might have been asking the wrong set of questions. On some level, I don’t really care what “value” fiction, or escapism, has. That sort of thinking is based on the idea that the material world is the only world with value.

In The Two Towers (at least the movie, it’s been awhile since I’ve read the books, and I’m going to paraphrase anyway), Aragorn has a dream about his partner Arwen. In the real world, he’s near-dead, but in the dream he’s safe and with his love. He tells Arwen “It’s only a dream.”

“Then it’s a good dream,” she replies.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned these past few years, it’s that the world of our dreams does not inherently have less value than the waking world. We can enjoy fiction for its own sake. Art ought not be in service of the revolution, that is entirely backwards. The revolution should be in service of art.

The material can be in service to the ideal. The waking world can be in service of our dreams.

It was yet another anarchist fiction author who taught me this last bit, though he died nearly a century before I was born. Oscar Wilde, in his book The Soul of Man Under Socialism, made it clear that the purpose of socialism is for the sake of art, not that art should exist for the sake of socialism. And he wove one of the more interesting ways of perceiving the individual versus the community: “The community will supply the useful things and the beautiful things will be made by the individual. It is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other.”

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I don’t think we even need to understand the value of escapism intellectually. Our bodies and our minds know that it is nice to read a book or watch a movie and be someone else for a while.

The world is getting darker, in most regards. Certainly, from a more literal point of view, it’s getting hotter, and it’s getting more fascist. Now more than ever we will turn to escape as one of the tools available to us.

Now more than ever, we see ourselves in the struggle of the strange little hobbits caught up in the wild world with its war and misery, just looking for a barrel of longbottom leaf, but looking to do some good in the world in the process. Now more than ever, we think about Frodo and Sam talking to one another while marching to peril and doom, when Sam said:

And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.

We seek escape not because we are afraid of living our own adventures, but because we’re all caught up in one, and navigating it the best we can. We might not go on to “a good end,” but we can imagine we might. And if we don’t survive this? Then as Theoden, King of Rohan said, (look I’m on a Lord of the Rings kick, okay?), “at least we may make such an end as will be worth a song.”