Sketches

I found an article from the telegraph talking about low doors in wall being used in literature as a way to capture our imaginations. I found some good quotes in the article that attempt to explain why these doorways are so often used to spark our curiosity.

Telegraph Article

"Now, in our imaginations, they would also represent the way to those most inaccessible places, such as ideal childhoods or parallel, more exciting universes. Whether or not we discover such metaphorical low doors, we feel, determines nothing less than how much we get from life; whether we just skim helplessly over the years until the coffin lid closes, unaware of what life has to offer, or whether we successfully milk it for everything it’s got. "

"Here is a feature positively groaning with symbolism, association and meaning."

"Not that where a low door leads matters much: it’s the notion that’s so exciting. In the 20th century, the social changes wrought by two world wars helped condition us – assisted, obviously, by F. Hodgson Burnett – to the idea that secret gardens are places of wistful dereliction. But having alighted on a portal to paradise, who would quibble about what follows?"


I started working on some visual research for my essay, working on the idea of doorways or portals into different worlds. The idea being to compare them with the portals we use to escape from our day to day lives through escapism. I like the images of the famous portals from film and literature and how they are used to tell stories but for the purposes of my essay I think the routes we take into escapism will be of more use.

Line or Shape

I looked for images to do with borders between worlds, I kept finding images of doorways or portals. I started to realise that the connection or route between the worlds is the subject of my essay. escapism offers people a route out of their own existence and into another. The images of doorways, paths, portals or wormholes to name a few form some interesting shapes and comparisons.

I want to start my visual research by creating illustrations of famous doors/portals from literature and film. I think a collection of them would make an intriguing poster which would tie into the death of the author. The message of the piece would depend on the viewers own memories and experiences. Many of the portals used in film have similar shapes and characteristics. I would also like to explore how these portals are used as a storytelling tool.

Ideas

I want to try and add some direction to my essay. I have done some research looking at the reasons escapism is viewed in a negative way and how that impacts on escapist fiction authors. I think it would be interesting to explore whether there is a moral obligation for authors to try and tailor their work in such a way that it can have a positive impact on the readers lives. Neil Gaiman talks about fiction taking the reader to new worlds and equipping them with weapons and skills that they can use in the real world. I want to address some questions in my essay.

Do authors have a responsibility to create fiction that supports and educates to the reader?

Can escapism have a positive impact on a persons life?

Is it unhealthy for someone to avoid all escapist activities?

Do views on escapism vary in different cultures?

Quotes

I have been trying to connect my essay question to the idea of 'line', although I have an idea I would like to explore I have not been able to find images depicting lines and borders between good and bad or the line between everyday life and the worlds we escape into through films, books and other escapist activities. I am going to look more at film as fantasy films often deal with a physical manifestation of these borders. I have been collecting quotes from a variety  of sources based on escapism.

"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. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"

J. R. R. Tolkien

"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."

Jean Cocteau

   "Would we be so enamored with dystopian fiction if we lived in a culture where violent death was a major concern? It wouldn't be escapism."
Maggie Stiefvater

"People talk about escapism as though it's something nasty but escapism is wonderful!"

Margaret Forster

   "I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers."

C. S. Lewis

"There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality."

Arthur C Clarke

"Paradise was always over there, a day's sail away. But it's a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home."
J Maarten Troost

"...When people lose their way and lack a real purpose for living they often fall back on certain forms of escapism as a form of self-soothing..."

John Geddes

I wanted to try and find a footing that would allow me to discover new avenues to investigate. I think that gaining these varieties of different points of view or interpretations of escapism will help me to find these paths.

      

        

Line

Todays COP seminar was very interesting and has given me some ideas on how to start my visual journal. We talked about definitions of line, shape, texture and colour. The definitions of line really interested me, the idea of boundaries or divides opens up a lot of possible avenues to explore in terms of society, culture and history. More specifically when applied to my subject I think about the divide between our everyday lives and the places we escape to. There seems to be a widely held belief that the two are completely separate even though lots of people manage to successfully tailor their entire lives around activities that others would see as escapist.  Another example of  the meaning of the line is a line we should not cross, what makes an escapist activity a positive one and at what point do we go too far into this world and lose touch with the 'real world'?

The idea of lines being boundaries also ties in to the Neil Gaiman interview about genre. Genres are invisible boundaries that can either be inclusive or exclusive depending on your point of view. they are a toll that helps to organise and market an overcrowded marketplace but more than that. Over timed they have formed into some kind of hierarchical structure where certain genres are revered and other looked down upon. A genres position in this hierarchy can change over time with trends and some can disappear all together. These boarders act as constraints, there are rules that must be abided by to be part of the group. very few authors dare to cross these boundaries, this may well be due to publishers demands and the need to cater to an audience that has a set of expectations that must be met.

Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro

I found an interview between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro talking about genre, although not directly related to escapism they talk about the genre snobbery in literature which I think could shine a light on the causes of negative feeling towards escapist fiction. The opening dialogue straight away tackles to invisible boundaries that genres create and the way that the age of a book changes how it is perceived. Kazuo Ishiguro asks "Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?". Genres are a useful way for people to find similar books to the ones they know they like, but they seem to have become a constraint on writers. Genres create preconceptions about what a book should contain which takes away a writers ability to write freely.

Neil Gaiman makes the point that "if you were a novelist writing in 1920 or 1930, you would simply be perceived as having written another novel. When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, “Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic.” It may well be the case that it is writers that have dared to cross the boundaries have created the most interesting, thought provoking work. Genres seem to have developed from a way to distinguish between different subjects to a format that writers must adhere to.

What seems to be apparent is that genres are most useful to publishers and book shops as a way to market their product to a specific audience and that over time genres change to reflect the market. Neil Gaiman metions talking to someone who worked in Borders whose job it was to find where to put books that were in the horror section when they got rid of the genre from the stores. The market for horror was dying out and books previously placed in this section were spread out between science fiction, fantasy and thriller. This had a nock on effect on the authors who had to market themselves to their new target audience.
Neil Gaiman talks about the sudden commercial success of fantasy in the 1960's when Lord of the Rings became very popular with a wide audience of people that would not necessarily be pre existing fans of fiction. This popularity caused the major publishers to trawl their archiver for anything that was written in a similar way. As well as this there were new authors that started to write very similar stories.
"By the time fantasy had its own area in the bookshop, it was deemed inferior to mimetic, realistic fiction. I think reviewers and editors did not know how to speak fantasy; were not familiar with the language, did not recognise it." NG
The negative view of fantasy caused various authors to feel the need to defend the credibility of the works and their authors. Neil Gaiman picks out two quotes from famous authors reacting to these views.

A S Byatt said "These are real books, they’re saying important things and they are beautifully crafted,”

Terry Pratchett said “You know, you can do all you want, but you put in one fucking dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.”

A S Byatts quote possibly has more weight to it as she was not a labelled as a fantasy writer. The fact that a well established writer who won the Booker Prize and has been named in lists of great British writers shows haw widespread the negative view of fantasy has spread and how the genre defines the novels rather than the other way round. Once an negative association has been made it can be hard to shake, a genre could contain numerous works worthy of praise that are overlooked due to the way they are labelled.
In the interview Kazuo Ishiguro mentions something interesting.

"it probably wouldn’t have occur­red to me to use the science-fiction dimension for Never Let Me Go ten or 15 years earlier. I actually tried to write that same story twice in the Nineties but I just couldn’t find a way to make it work. And it was only the third time I tried, around 2001, that this idea came to me: if I made them clones, who were being harvested for organ donation, the story would work.
Before that, in a more realist setting, I was really struggling: how can I get young people to go through the experience of old people, how can I contrive this situation? I was coming up with not very good ideas, like they’ve all got a disease, or they came across nuclear materials and so they were doomed to a shorter lifespan."

By opening up a new world with new possibilities an author is armed with an almost endless array of ways to tell their story. Concepts that are hard to communicate using 'traditional fiction' can be brought to life. Fantasy opens up a whole new world where the authors imagination is not confined by what happens in 'real life'. In the same way the reader is free to explore this world and use it to make sense of complex issues that have implications in their own lives. Genre has become a constraint and so has the negative view of escapism.

Essay Question Research 4

I found an article about escapist fiction by Sana Hussain called 'Literary or Not – The Reality of Escapist Fiction'. Sana Hussain is the feature editor for 'The Missing Slate' magazine and describes herself as "a shy introvert who is apprehensive about everything new and unfamiliar". I mention that because I think it may be a trait that is common among people that most enjoy escapist fiction and possibly gain the most from it. She talks about escapist fiction being viewed negatively and by highbrow readers and critics, as if its is somehow unworthy to inhabit the same world as literary fiction. Sana makes some interesting points in this article attempting to explain the misconceptions surrounding escapist fiction and the literary trends that determine the value of a genre. She argues that some older texts that are viewed as some of the greatest literary works of all time could be labelled as escapist fiction if were written  today, but they would never be described as sub-literary.

"Seen within a historical context, this bias towards escapist fiction seems even more erroneous; some of the writings that are now hailed as literary classics were the escapist writings of another century. ‘Beowulf’ and ‘The Odyssey’, considered to be among the greatest works of literature ever produced, have provided inspiration for later works of fantasy. But despite the fact that they are inspired by these classics and contain the same stock characters, adventures across oceans and the archetypal fight between good and evil, these later works are classified negatively as escapist fiction and not literature. George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ could be classified as escapist fiction by current standards, but cannot be called sub-literary in any way. Jane Austen’s novels have all the prerequisites of escapist fiction; yet today, the works modeled after hers are dismissed as intellectual drivel."

Talking about the possible benefits of escapist fiction Sana explores the idea that escapist fiction causes us to become immersed in the character of someone else and helps us to develop compassion and empathy. Sana quotes a Norwegian psychologist called Frode Stenseng who says "the direct immersion in another person’s mind and body – that stimulates our empathic muscles”. I am going to research him to try and gain more of an insight into the psychology of escapism.

A huge problem with the arrogance of certain highbrow readers and critics in relation to genre is that it removes the possibility of fairly judging a piece of fiction on its own merits, the text has already been tarnished by its genre and will, by some, never been seen as equal with literary texts in there opinion. Sana addresses this saying:

"The distinction needs to be made on good and bad writing, not on the assumption that certain genre fiction is worthless because it provides an escape to the readers; an escape that may in many cases liberates the reader and reintroduces him/her to a different reality."

Is it only escapist fiction that provides an escape? it could be argued that all types of fiction are an escape from the world we inhabit.

"if you ask me, escapism and realism are not mutually exclusive; based on the premise that all reading is eventually escapist, realist writing can contain the potential to provide escape. Likewise, escapist writing can confront the readers with the grave realities of life. Fairytales perhaps explain this dichotomy best; despite being the quintessential form of escapist writing, they are layered with universal and timeless life lessons."

Images Through Theory

For the task today I was given the word bricolage. In relation to visual arts the definition of bricolage is " construction or creation from a diverse range of available things." The practice has been used in postmodernism as a way to generate innovative and unique ideas. Constraints are used in most if not all areas of visual arts as a way to create new innovative results and change the way we think about our work. Bricolage can be used as a form of appropriation by using pre existing items with a social or cultural significance. This allows an artist to use the items original meaning to help them add meaning to their own work. Bricolage is linked to a number of the other words we looked at today, some more directly than others. It is linked to parody as it is the methodology that many artists, writers and film makers use to achieve their goals. It is an effective method because it employs pre existing visual signifiers that we all know and recognise as having meaning, the artist does not have to create the meaning themselves. they are the free to parody the meaning knowing that the audience will understand the idea behind it.

The artwork used by the sex pistols for their song god save the queen has become iconic, maybe as iconic as the original images they have used to make it. The eyes being blocked out which looks like methods commonly used to make people anonymous, often people involved in crimes. nothing in this image has been created specially for this but the thought behind the way the images have been put together create a powerful thought provoking image.

In this piece of advertising the bottom poster is only possible as a response to the Apple one above. The paint firm are effectively high jacking the advertising campaign of a much bigger company. Apple is a globally recognised brand associated with quality and innovation, at the very least this advert is funny and so memorable but it may also trigger an unconscious association between the two brands.

There are theories that all the characters in Family Guy are based on other characters from other cartoons that pre date the series. If this is true then the entire cartoon a product of bricolage. The more I read about bricolage the more examples of it I see. I need to research theorists that are interested in bricolage, I think I should start with postmodernist theorists and see where that leads.

Essay Question research 3

I want to take another look at the article by Dr Hurd as it tackles the changes in technology and the rise in escapism and depression. Dr Hurd talks about technology providing easy and instantaneous methods of escapism that can act as the "vehicle" for people to move away from their day to day lives. He goes on to say that although new technology makes escapism easier it cannot be blamed for a rise in escapism as people must have underlying beliefs or behaviour patterns that lead them towards escapist actions, "we can’t blame technology itself. For a person to engage in unhealthy escapism, he or she must have some underlying core beliefs or habits leading up to and reinforcing the problem. If somebody has these unhealthy or dysfunctional core beliefs and emotions, they will naturally gravitate towards any kind of escape.".

Dr Hurd talks about changes in society rather then technology being a more likely cause of a rise in escapism specifically in America. the middle class in America (and the UK)  would pass for the upper class in a large number of countries, and this social stability has removed the notion that "You worked and did your part for your own survival, or you died.". He uses the ages that children leave home saying that in the past we left home a lot younger because our parents couldn't afford to support us so we had to be motivated to work, earn money and survive. Now that a large number of families are better off financially children have lost that drive. he makes some good points here but I do think the world has become a more complex place with the development of technology, people are bombarded with information every minute of every day, the whole world seems to be in debt. In the past you went to work, got paid, bought food and were happy with that. Every day now we are bombarded with fear mongering news stories that threaten our way of life. it must be hard for young people today to have a good grasp of the world they are inheriting. I think that another factor in the rise of escapism could be the complexities and stresses of modern life, people feel the need to find something simpler that they can fully understand and this in turn could help them to better understand the world they live in. Of course escapism is a broad term and not all escapist activities would fit this idea.

"It has to do with less of a need for people to survive by their work, which means that if you’re going to work, then you’ll need to have some serious career ambition."

This quote is talking about a decrease in ambition that sees people being tempted to drift into fantasy. I would like to explore the idea of encouraging and inspiring people to work in fields that interest them through escapist fiction. Neil Gaiman talks about fiction not only providing an escape but equipping readers with weapons and armour to help them deal with the real world.