J. R. R. Tolkien: "Insufficiently Serious" " 'escapist fare' "

[ish mailian]

But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature -
of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself -
then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently
Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have
traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal
children they must deal with. Looking back on ''Frankenstein,'' which
she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, ''I have an affection
for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief
were but words which found no true echo in my heart.'' The Gothic
attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly
survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap
thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of
town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature
so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always
win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know
better. We say, ''But the world isn't like that.'' These genres, by
insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and
so they get redlined under the label ''escapist fare.''

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/05/tolkiens-short-story-about-promise-fantasy/588700/




https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html?