Art is escapism, right? It whisks you from your mundane or burdened world and plonks you into someone else's. You cringe at 'plonk', I'm guessing (I do), because it feels such a crude rendering of the sense of release you feel at your escape. (Escape?) Such a smooth, elegant, longed-for release. I'm out of adjectives to describe this sense and none of the ones I have used feel right.
Tell me, what are you - the specific you, reading this post, and not the general you of all readers - escaping from? The complications of modern life? Its mundaneness and routine? Or something more sinister?
There are the more fantastical escapes - sci-fi and fantasy, historical what-ifs - and then the escapes into the complications of other lives. Which do you prefer? Does it make a difference? What would you do face-to-face with a dragon or in another skin or faced with a perfect Prince or Princess Charming? (Can we know?)
Following on from the previous post, when I was about seven (young enough to be called innocent but able to read), my mother subscribed to a Reader's Digest series of hardcover books about legends and fairytales, on my behalf. Each new one would arrive every six months. The more... disturbing... she would hide, saying I could read them when I was older. Nothing stays hidden from a seven-year-old for long.
I adored the ones I wasn't supposed to read, probably because I wasn't supposed to read them, because the stories and illustrations were threaded with an illicit thrill, and because ala previous post, isn't that the intention? Both the stories and illustrations were violent, harsh, dark, possibly disturbing. But they were more 'real' to me than glittering fairies and happy endings.
They were an escape.
But... but... but... An escape is from, not to, the real; isn't that what I said, oh, 15 lines ago? So fickle is the blogger, such an hypocrite, abusing the impermanence of the online space.
No, wait! Why is George Orwell's 1984 one of The Great Novels? Why does it resonate when it is our world but not? Why do Terry Pratchett's novels have so much to say about the ethics of leadership? Because they are like telescopes: they cast a circular limit around a point and, with some fumbling, focus and magnify the point. They give us the distance to see ourselves.
For me, literature is about burrowing into myself - beyond the superficial landscape of the imagination - with a backpack of symbols, ready to inflict my magnifying glass on anything that latches onto one of the symbols, like an enzyme in my intestines.
Does this mean you can continue to judge a person by the books on their shelves? Perhaps; I confess I do. You won't know what that book represents to that other person, and chances are you won't get a satisfactory answer if you ask them bluntly. But maybe your judgement says something about you and your inner world, and perhaps that's enough.
In this vein, my favourites by a wide margin are Possession by AS Byatt and Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz. Make of that what you will.
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