[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Returning to HerenIstarion's point, how many of the minor intellectual gaolers really do believe wholeheartedly in a cause? So many of those who decry intellectual conscientious objectors do so despite the fact that they are doing nothing about the world's problems for themselves. Robert Windbag (author of the HP review above) has identified juvenile delinquency as a problem, but I haven't heard of him doing anything practical to address the issue. He might as well have been living in someone else's fantasy world for all he's actually done to help this one. Besides which, as has been pointed out above, a world in which teenagers are all petty criminals is as much a fantasy as one in which they all spend their evenings discussing Sappho over tea and crumpets or foiling robberies.

I think that there's more to this than devotion to some real-life cause. I think that some people are just proud of their own ability to contemplate unflinchingly an unfair, ill-managed and brutal world. To invent a new world, even if it contains the same problems as our own, is seen as side-stepping the issue, shutting oneself off to the harsh, bleak reality that they perceive themselves to inhabit. Readers of 'fantasy' are their Lotos-eaters, who inhabit a self-made fool's paradise. This, as Bertie Wooster would say, is where they make their bloomer. Unflinching contemplation without action is so close to acceptance that they look the same. Suggesting that there is hope, for example by pointing out that some adolescents enjoy a spot of Chaucer now and then and that most of them aren't likely to be knifing anybody in the near future, challenges the realist to do something to help hope into reality; most significantly, to risk disillusionment by putting their faith in something. After a century that abused and misdirected idealism on a grand and global scale, a lot of people just don't trust idealists. What does fantasy do but allow us carte blanche to ask 'what if?', to reject those things about our world that we would change had we the power to do so. The danger is that 'what if?' will become the more dynamic 'why not?', which can only get closer to action by ceasing to be a question. Escapism leads to questions, questions lead to change, and change is not always for the better.

I doubt that most of this has been thought out in so full a form by dyed in the wool realists, and there are many shades of intellectual and moral laziness involved that I have not explored, but I think that the main point is the great demand that alternatives and hope place on the individual: it's easier to declare mournfully that the world's going to hell in a handbasket than it is to take a chance that action will stop that. It's easier to decry escapism than it is to contemplate our own captivity, and its easier to complain of universal madness than it is to step outside the asylum. Perhaps considering things from another angle might make the 'they' who are responsible for the evils of society include the complaining 'I', as it almost certainly does. Perhaps a temporary escape will just make the real world seem worse, or perhaps it's easier to think that what we have is all we can have than it is to regard our own failure.

Medieval literature had no qualms about stepping outside reality. Dreams and visions were a good vehicle for expressing religious tenets while avoiding the possibility of promoting heresy. One could depict Heaven, for example, whilst still being able to disclaim the vision as 'just a dream' if it disagreed with some obscure teaching of the Church. One of the true classics of this genre is Pearl or The Pearl, which addresses quite complex theological responses to death and bereavement through the medium of a dreamer's conversation with the soul of his dead daughter. Although the author believed entirely that there was such a place as Heaven, his aim is to step outside the world to consider how best one may order one's life in order to get there; how, in fact, to reject the demands of the world in favour of those of the spirit. The vision of the afterlife portrayed in this work is based on scripture, but much of its colour and detail have arisen from individual sub-creation. One might call such a work 'practical fantasy', since it aims to alter the behaviour of people in the primary world through the description of an imagined reality. The Pearl poet hoped that the ideas expressed in his secondary world would improve his readers and guide them to a better way of life, because his secondary world was, according to the generally accepted world view of his readership, a concrete and definite although invisible reality. Heaven is more real than earth, or at least more universal and enduring, yet it can only be described in terms of the most elaborate fantasy. In other words, sometimes we must step outside the real world to approach the universal.

Such a view, far closer to Tolkien's than those of many of his contemporaries, is not compatible with a world that bases its reality on empiricism and observation. Nowadays we persuade with real-life examples, with names, dates, quotations; with science. More importantly the benefits must be tangible as well: our self-improvement manuals tell one how to lose weight, look younger, advance in business, make friends; very few of them promise to improve one's character, and it is no longer acceptable to describe the entire idea in the form of a dream. A practical world for practical people, but people are not exclusively practical, logical or scientific, and they miss their imaginative freedom. With those who appear not to, one might point out that if we have failed to create our own physical Utopia, then either the principles on which we tried to found it are wrong or it is impossible to create one at all. The system is hard to change and an abyss is not an easy thing to contemplate; however to divert one's mind from the question by concentrating on the concerns of the day is simplicity itself. It is easier to become one's own gaoler than it is to face life on the outside.