Saturday was a readers' day at Derbyshire's County Hall. I was there with Alex J from BRAG Films, asking everyone I could corner the same question: why do people like stories?
I don't know what I expected as an answer. Something deep maybe. After all, story telling seems to be fundamental to the human condition. But the answer most people gave was 'escapism'. People love stories because they like to escape from their lives.
I'm not sure what I think about that. Escapism seems too ordinary. Too mundane to be the profound motivation for storytelling. But perhaps I haven't understood what escapism really means.
Perhaps I should be asking a psychologist.
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Hi Rod. Just a comment on this from me - I think inside the notion of escapism, there is both 'escape from' but also, importantly, escape back into. One of the recurring lines in one of my favourite novelists' work (Ursula le Guin) is 'true journey is return'. In her literary criticism she explores the idea that while readers make a journey out from their lives to the world in a story, they also return to their life with a different set of eyes, ears, senses and emotions etc. which then can change their feelings about that life. I really agree with this. I think within the 'escape from' form of escapism there are things which make the 'return back into' part of the journey easier to absorb in a way. You might not realise that you've just accommodated into your own understanding, some completely different perspective of how things are - because you were busy escaping who you are for a little while - but while doing that, all that other information went in. It's like that message from the aliens in the film Contact (sorry, that was a book first wasn't it, but haven't read the book) which looks like a TV replay from 1936, but has a whole massive amount of information stored underneath it which also comes through on the same wavelength. That's my feeling about escapism anyway, for what it's worth... Naomi
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