Author: Amory Crane

It is perhaps surprising to find, in the laws of England’s bankruptcy courts, that among the personal belongings a man is afforded to keep in his dire straits are his books. Televisions, alas, are also exempted. This is perhaps less surprising. For it is not at all uncommon to find twinned with such civilising gestures an equal aptitude for barbarism. The poor never do catch a break. 

Anyone reading this who has ever felt the sharp edge of penury — and I include here all artists, poets, novelists, critics, and musicians — will know with what ease debt turns the postman’s eager steps into a harbinger of potential ruin. Knowing that however bad things get one will not be parted from one’s library is a palliative to this otherwise awful circumstance. For though a cliché, it is nevertheless true that one of Literature’s chief pleasures is escape. Now, before you, gentle reader, begin to think I have taken my cue from Tumblr pages, and fear I’ll begin to wax lyrical about cozy autumn afternoons curled up with a cup of tea and a volume of whatever genre-splicing novel is currently modish, let me just explain. There is, of course, mindless escape. Those novels to which I have referred are the literary equivalent of trash television, and serve a purpose (as well as a vice) in removing oneself utterly from one’s circumstance. They do this principally by removing oneself from one’s thoughts. (‘What’s wrong with that?’ comes the eternal refrain.) But there is also the kind of escape that is a sleight of hand, and which comes not from a jettisoning of life, but close attention to it.

Nabokov, raging against a certain kind of historicism, was right when he referred to great novels as fairy tales. Here then we have the most obvious allusion to escapism. But if we take seriously (and with a novelist as serious as Nabokov we should) his claims as a moral — as opposed to a moralising — novelist, we find our common conception of these two modes don’t quite match up. That Nabokov, in many ways an arch formalist, chooses the fairytale as his means of approaching a text like Mansfield Park or Metamorphosis, or indeed, as an aim for a novel like Lolita, is certainly curious until we recognise that nebulous but nevertheless irrefutable territory where form and content align. I’m talking here of where the literature of escape proves itself simultaneously the literature of direct appreciation of the world at hand.

Perhaps it best to think of this seeming paradox by reference to something like the cave analogy. If you recall, in Plato’s cave the prisoners are chained against the wall, forced to know only the passing shadows of objects. They live in a world of simulacrum, but one in which they have inhabited for so long and since birth that they take the shadows for the objects themselves, and as the constituted reality. The view of today would be such people live in a total ignorance, blinded by unexamined prejudice and received opinion. Yet, as Allan Bloom once pointed out way back in The Closing of the American Mind, it is only by holding such prejudices that one can test one’s assumptions about the world in the first place, and, in doing so, find oneself on the path to enlightenment. One can hardly leave the cave without having first been in it.

Great books then are news from the surface. They are escapes from the habitualised manner in which we view the world, and it is in our sojourns away from the circumstances of our lives that we return to find those circumstances refreshed. These riches are of course open to anyone who displays only a modicum of discrimination, which is surely the weeding tool of a cultivated mind. For if we take a deliberately minor example from say, Hamlet, we can see how even in its most fleeting iterations this phenomena operates. ‘But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,’ offers us a familiar image — a red dawn — in a manner unfamiliar. The use of metaphor, of describing one thing as another, defamiliarises us from our habitual notions, and renews our appreciation for the image in a way that, in this instance, ‘a rising red sun’ simply does not. 

There are real-world implications to this. For words, once over-used, are like a debased coinage. The more unthinkingly they are passed around the more the people exchanging in this worthless currency are having their thoughts formed by someone else. Nowhere is this more overtly the case as in politics; but if one thinks it is only among the public sphere that such attenuated meaning is traded then one would be sadly mistaken. For how often, if we look clear-eyed at our personal relations, do we find ourselves using the same well-thumbed language out of sloth? To speak with a tired language to the woman you love is to allow other men to form your own words, and, soon enough, to look at her through their eyes. You disrespect those you love by not seeing who they really are.

 It is then the job of any serious writer to reinvigorate this language, and to draw from it not a hackneyed significance but a meaning which maps more directly onto life. It is, consequently, our duty to read such writers, to escape from an ignorance of the world and to look harder and notice. For in retreating into these great fairy tales, where objects, thoughts, feelings, and all manner of phenomena are described and presented by means of others, we return not with a sense of dread to the postman knocking on the door, but with a sense of seeing things closer to how they are. And it is only by seeing things as they are that we can face reality with any mettle, whether making love or stopping the boats. We could, then, do worse than remind ourselves of Dr Johnson’s description, that ‘the only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.’ For it is by allowing us this retreat from life the better to see it on our return that writing does, in fact, do both.

— Amory Crane

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.