The idea of escaping in a story, glorified in The Arabian Nights, makes modern Western culture deeply suspicious. Certain commentators routinely hurl accusations of ‘escapism’ at blockbuster movies, TV dramas and fantasy novels. The intellectual and writer Germaine Greer once declared: ‘Ever since I arrived at Cambridge as a student in 1964 and encountered a tribe of fully grown women wearing puffed sleeves, clutching teddies and babbling excitedly about the doings of hobbits, it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the 20th century.’1 Such pedestrian gatekeepers consider escapism bad, the idea being that a yearning for other worlds is a sign of intellectual weakness. Perhaps.
The fact remains that Superman saved me.
In one of the most passionate essays on fairy stories ever written, J. R. R. Tolkien (who might well be the most influential writer of the twentieth century) defined escapism as ‘very practical’ and went on to say that it ‘might even be heroic’. He made the good point that, when a person is stuck in jail, you cannot blame them for trying to go home. Those who rant against escapism ‘are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter’.2
When Superman came for me, I was stuck in a small town without bookshops, with a dying father and a family in a profound crisis. Reality was overwhelming: of course I wanted out. The idea that in life you should just grit your teeth and soldier on, no matter what, is macho lunacy. None of us is strong enough to withstand reality when it has it in for you, and in those years, it was coming at me full on.
Superman believed I could make it, but he knew I could not make it on my own. He would help in any way he could. He would take me to Kandor, a city in a bottle; to his Fortress of Solitude, the ultimate kid’s bedroom, self-contained in some far-flung icy place; he would take me to impossibly remote planets and beyond. I came back from these places stronger and better, for the simple reason that I had seen that other lives were possible. Even though I could not completely escape reality at that moment, reality could change.
In Tolkien’s words, ‘the world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it’.3 Superman kept open for me a window on the world outside, and he gave me hope that I could reach it one day, in the same way Scheherazade kept open for the sultan a window on life’s gourmandizing variety. As another great writer, Ursula K. Le Guin, put it, ‘the direction of escape is toward freedom’.4
Our wonder fades after we have been stuck in jail for too long. Fairies have shown us that we are trapped in a web made of all the things we are absolutely certain of. To obey the orders we receive, we must be absolutely certain that it makes sense to work nine to five in somebody else’s office, that cash measures accomplishment, that there is a hierarchy of taste, and ultimately, that the universe is a watch. Disenchantment is the name of the cage we live in. To escape its confines, we need to learn to think like storytellers.
When Tolkien says that the confusion between the flight of the deserter and the escape of the prisoner is not always a sincere error, he means, I think, that there is a precise plan, a conspiracy if you like, to keep us all in jail. They actively want us not to escape to other worlds, so that we won’t get ideas in our heads about changing this one. They want us to be sitting ducks, because we are difficult to control when we fly. And the worst thing is, they are us.
The conspiracy is not another sneaky scheme of Lex Luthor’s. We are all in it: we are conspiring against ourselves, like Shahryar. Someone who realizes that we can stop at any time and change course, someone who knows enough stories not to be certain of anything any more – someone like Scheherazade – would never forget that we have made our social realities, and that we can unmake them. Someone like that would not fear the power of any sultan; she would be dangerous enough herself.
Superman taught me, a scrawny boy who had been served a crappy hand, that I didn’t have to be a victim; that I could pull through, and be dangerous.
*
After each flight with Superman, I landed back in my room. I closed the comic and put it away, lovingly, on the shelf next to the others, in a place where dust would not settle on them, and then continued with my day: I checked on my father, I finished my homework. I counted the weeks, months and years that separated me from university, my final escape.
I knew that I could not move to Metropolis, nor did I want to. I had friends and family I loved on this side of the page; I had projects for the future (I was thinking maybe I could become a writer); I helped as much as I could with the situation at home. I could not deny the hard facts of life, but my journeys with Superman reminded me not to take them for granted. Those flights were supply runs: I was foraging for resources to bring back to my mundane life.
I would never physically walk the streets of Kandor, and I did not consciously model myself on Clark Kent, Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen. But all of those things – the splendour of Kandor and the honesty of Clark, the courage of Lois and the sympathy of Jimmy – made my world vaster, and filled my head with new, unexpected things, keeping the flame of wonder alive. They made the hard facts of life a little softer.
Stories do that, regardless of whether they contain superheroes. Elizabeth Bennet is every bit as made up as Superman – and every bit as real. There are, admittedly, some differences between the two characters, but literal truth is not one of them. What they have in common is far more important to us: all good tales are paths to wonder. They give us new ways of looking of things, such as memory and perception in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; or the Italian-American experience in John Fante’s Bandini Quartet; or the pains and joys of growing up in the Harry Potter novels. They make us think thoughts we never dared think before. They confront us with vastness. They are wonder tales, all of them; it just happens that some of them contain house-elves and dementors.
Our lives can be wonder tales also, provided we learn how to narrate them as such. Scheherazade shows us the way. There are five things she knew, five things she would be happy for us to know. By learning them, we shall break out of our cage.
*
The first thing Scheherazade knew is that stories make us.
If I asked you to describe the first time that you screwed up with a lover, you would tell me a story. It would be a heavily edited version of what really happened: you would remember some of the things you said and some of the things she said, but not all of them, and not necessarily the most important ones. When you meet her twenty years later, and you are both very civilized about it, you go back to what happened, and you have very different recollections of it – so much so that it seems the pair of you were in two different stories. She is sure that her version is right, but you are just as certain that yours is. You do not want to change your story, because in the last twenty years you have made a lot of choices based on what you thought had happened, and it would be painful, impossibly so, to reconsider them. And she is in exactly the same position.
The thing we call ‘identity’ is a storybook, a selection of tales we tell ourselves, which have very practical consequences. The sultan’s storybook was hopeless (and rather small), and he ended up chopping off heads. The larger our storybook, and the more varied its content, the more open to wonder we become.