In the last few decades it grew popular for critics to predict and mourn the death of the novel. The death of the novel is really the death of their particular kind of novel: imprisonism literature. It’s as if someone said at their father’s funeral: “Fatherhood is dead to me” or before their own suicide “goodbye cruel world.” It may be the end of fatherhood for the mourner, the end of the world for the suicide, but as McCann would have it, the great world spins on. In the same way we now bear witness to the slow death of a particular kind of novel right when the genre of novel per se sells more copies than ever before.

So what’s dying?

A particular aberration and deformation rather than the root and heart of the novel: we are, in a sense, watching the death of a brief two-hundred-year cancer on the skin of this our great body of fiction that stretches from Gilgamesh to Grindelwald.

This tumor on human history’s body of fiction needs a clinical name and so I’ve chosen the word Imprisonism. For if we literary folk must call names – if the world of fiction must take on the belittling term “escapism” – then works that do the opposite must take on an equally pejorative term. And putting pejorative terms side by side like this will show first how namecalling in the game of genre when compared to true naming feels childish at best and second a contrasting pejorative will show which ism and therefore which genre is truly pejore, truly the Latin for “worse.”

By “imprisonism” I mean books that pretend as if this present world (even this present America or this present New York City) is all that there is, books that take no real interest in distant history (let alone revisionist history) or any real interest in the distant future (let alone dystopia) or any real interest in a distant planet (let alone an alternate universe or a full-blown phantasmagoria and fantasy). The Imprisonism novels are allegedly about “real life,” which of course means first for imprisonists to be philosophically consistent they must deny any universe in which fantasy narratives exist. They would completely ignore how Dumbledore’s question was really and truly asked inside of our present world: “Of course this is happening inside your head, Harry, by why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” I won’t waste words here to point out why and how delusional this is. Regardless, these books focus mostly on present pains and the sort of monotonous and redundant literary angst taught at most Ivy League and State University MFA programs. But it’s not a new phenomenon. Certainly Dickens dealt with it a bit in his time. Partly because of his popularity and partly because of his posture and partly because of his genres and tropes he wasn’t taken seriously as a part of the classic tradition until Chesterton’s criticism. What marks imprisonism most vividly is its denial of anything other than what’s immediately in front of the author’s nose. Nevermind the reader. If a tree falls in the woods and an imprisonist wasn’t there to hear it, then it did not fall even if Thor himself chopped it down.

The whole movement of imprisonism can be summarized both in the website Imprisonism.com and their leading quote:

It’s almost universally true, as was said first in whispers in some English pubs and then progressively in the echoes of a growing western choir over the last century, that prison is worse than escape. When the prison is an enemy prison camp or a concentration camp, there is no denying that prison is worse than escape for as Alissa Wilkinson asked on Twitter recently: what are we escaping from? And what are we escaping to?

As Coleridge and Pratchett and Chesterton and Bradbury and Lewis and King and Rowling and Tolkien and Gaiman and MacDonald and many others have pointed out, escapism simply lets us envision a world that is either better or worse than our own in order for us first to meditate on the metaphysical and quantum realities behind this day to day creation we encounter and then to extrapolate out with various ideas that may change the world for the better. For where would Elon Musk be without the visions of Douglas Adams? Where would our allegations of Orwellianism aimed at Silicon Valley or The White House be without George Orwell? Escapism deals with underlying assumptions and toys with physics in order to rebuild our world from its metaphysical footing and foundation on up. It is precisely radical: it starts with the roots. Anyone who doubts this refuses to seriously consider the metaphors, archetypes, visions, and metanarratives in the sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King. Whatever “I Have a Dream is,” it’s escapism. And because of it and speeches like it we did, in fact, escape.

Imprisonism for the last few generations has done the opposite: it has fed us shit and called it sugar. It wouldn’t have been so bad had the sugar lobby held less sway during the last hundred years, but in our addiction to spoon-fed oligarchy, imprisonists have been given room to say of their literature that it’s good shit and that their authors gave a shit and that these books would make us happy as a pig in shit and said it all through shit eating grins. The truth is the opposite. Respectively: no it’s not, no they didn’t, and no it hasn’t.

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First: is imprisonism good?

Often people talk about imprisonism in contrast to escapism as if imprisonism is better, that is to say that imprisonism is better than the goodness of escapism. For imprisonism to be good it would first have to affirm the existence of goodness. Shaw, one of the earlier imprisonists and disciples of Ibsen who cared deeply about writing “real life,” said that “the golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” The irony is you’ll find this sort of nonsense in Game of Thrones as well, which shows you just how much ground the imprisonists have ceded: they must now masquerade as escapists.

But as I said above this is merely what imprisonists call “good shit” though they deny themselves its goodness: the feed us shit and call it sugar. For “the golden rule is that there is no golden rule” pretends to free us by imprisoning us: it tells us we have every freedom but the freedom to write moral laws about freedom. And that includes Shaw’s law. It’s a generalization denying us the right to make generalizations. What is man if he is not a thinking man? What is woman if she is not a generalizing woman? Why even use genres in the first place to put escapism in solitary confinement away from the sort of “real life stories” that have no moral codes if genre itself is bad? Isn’t the category of escapism a generalizing law? Hesiod might have put it more bluntly: of course Shaw believed in golden rules because he wouldn’t have liked it if his dinner guests shat in his sink. As Chesterton said: “When Mr. Shaw forbids men to have strict moral ideals, he’s acting like one who should forbid them to have children. The saying that ‘the golden rule is that there is no golden rule,’ can, indeed, be answered by being turned round. That there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron rule; a fetter on the first movement of a man.”

Imprisonism draws a hard line on physics in order to deconstruct metaphysics. Escapism deconstructs physics in order to affirm metaphysics.

It was George MacDonald who first made this observation:

“The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms – which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of Fancy: in either case, Law has been diligently at work…

“In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no offense to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey – and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.”

Of course some ambitious author will read this and immediately think, “I’ll write a story that proves you wrong.” To whom I bid good luck: it has been tried a million times and every author has failed. George R. R. Martin tried just that. Quite clearly his books aspire to show that heroes are monsters and monsters are heroes.

But the funny thing is that even in trying to do this, Mr. Martin never changed the definition of what is good and what is bad. He simply waves his hands and pretends as if goodness is less pervasive than it really is – and, frankly, the Calvinists have had him beat on that front for centuries as anyone familiar with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde could testify. Nobody in the world is so wicked as a good Calvinist. Ask any good Calvinist.

Besides, Game of Thrones didn’t redefine goodness because it still called Jamie’s transformation good, it still called The Hound’s rescue good, it still called Jon’s service good, and Dany’s faithfulness to Drogo good. Always despite their circumstances and trauma, of course, but it never for any moment changed moral law even when it pretended to do so. Even when it utterly glorified evil it never quite went so far as calling evil good and you only have to watch Martin get defensive in interviews about his rape and incest scenes to see that. Even nihilists must start somewhere and for the imprisonists – even imprisonists masquerading as escapists – they start with real virtues outside of this prison of earthly pain. (And let me go on record and say whatever I think of his philosophy, Mr. Martin taught me more about surprising the reader than just about anyone I’ve read. I appeal from his vices to his virtues, from what’s holding him back to what may help him escape even bits of his own escapism.)

So yes, the imprisonist draws a hard line on physics in order to deconstruct metaphysics. Escapism deconstructs physics in order to affirm metaphysics. It’s not when escapists point to the dragons outside that pisses off imprisonists. Rather they hate when escapists point to the dragons within.

For instance the Village Voice’s brand of feminism may well hold up the vice of rape as their reason for hating the virtue of chastity, their brand of parenting may well impress upon us the murder rate as justification for suppressing our birth rate, and therefore their brand of literature holds up the lies of daily reality as their reason for hating the truths of epic fantasy. The hypocrisy is rampant. I myself might have grown to believe in the imprisonist doctrine if their idea of real life were not so unreal. Hell, you might even still be able to find a critic out there who affirms the fantasy of genocide in order to deny the reality of morality. Eugenicists have not quite bred themselves out of the family line. Meanwhile JK Rowling and Stephen King speak forth in incantational magic that mutes the Village Voice. Rita Skeeter would never have understood: her magic was only a means to slander. Many magical realists (whatever that is) have done as much. Imprisonists will think me naïve that I do not talk about real world oppression. But I think imprisonists naïve for believing escapist stories like Black Panther and Maus and the house elves of Harry Potter could be talking about anything else.

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Second, do imprisonists care?

This is the main argument imprisonists wield: that escapists aren’t dealing with reality. That we sit idly by while the world gets worse. Nevermind how the most politically active people I know are all fantasy and sci fi readers and writers — we don’t even need such anecdotal evidence as push back, and here’s why:

Let us pretend that imprisonism literature did not arise from schools propped up by the financial elite of this nation, though such a case may well be made. Imprisonism would still be self-serving. For the only move imprisonism has is to hold up a mirror and in that kind of world, you’re stuck in a fun house warping reality and calling it “real.” Escapism almost never thinks about the self first off, but rather about the world and society and others. It was book five, you’ll remember, before Harry ever dealt with the Voldemort within and it was precisely his concern for his friends and neighbors that drove him to that point. Better than any book that I have ever read, fiction or otherwise, Brandon Sanderson’s most recent novel Oathbringer distilled the anxiety of discovering that your ancestors are the real villains. In one fell swoop he defined the quintessential American angst AND offered a way forward: a moral, collaborative, honest way. Many other good books have given a suitable diagnosis to this problem, but seldom do any of them offer prescriptions. When they do, it is never so lucid as Sanderson’s. His book is thoroughly post colonial, but you’ll never encounter it in the post colonial classes of any MFA program here in New York. Why?

Because it’s escapism.

And here’s the thing: when you’re only allowed to talk about the world as it is, you may never learn from the world as it has been before or could be in the future. You’re doomed to repeat history and doomed to no progress. True empathy — to truly get “inside” someone “to feel” as they do — you must fantasize and sometimes you need to fantasize in such a way that your situations are reversed. Would you discriminate based on eye color? Then why do you discriminate based on skin color? Only escapism can ask questions like these. Fantasy tends to deal with the metaphysics and moral codes of societies gone by and learns form them. Science Fiction tends to deal with the metaphysics and moral codes of the future – The Millions’ own Emily St. John Mandell made just that argument in her apologetic for science fiction Station Eleven, which ultimately argues that America both was and is one giant scifi experiment of people who leave home in a ship for a new world build upon new ideas, new imaginations. America is the story of escapism in the truest sense, according to Station Eleven. And I think she’s right. Even dystopia and its great grandfather apocalypse (such as Bell and the Dragon and the Revelation of St. John) tend to reveal the current virtues and vices of modern society through the lens of that brand of exaggeration employed in typical political cartoons and metaphors.

This of course will be called closed-minded by some: to suppose that fantasy employs better empathy than imprisonism and therefore better political and systematic critiques.

Yet empathy does not depend first on realism but rather upon reality, not first on empathy of emotion but first upon empathy of being: of real people in really hard situations choosing to lean into ultimate reality in spite of real evil. Courage, said one, is virtue at the testing point: real good in the face of real evil, patience when someone’s annoying you, loving those who hate you, kindness in the teeth of a rude culture, wisdom in a den of fools. That may be close-minded, but it’s only the close-mindedness of all weak people who hope to humble the strong through their courage. You cannot be both courageous and strong. Courage happens precisely when you’re weak, so if it’s close-minded, it’s only close-minded in the sense of the courageous resolve of those who imagine a better world than this.

There’s nothing more broad-minded than the mind narrowly focused on a vision of escape from such a prison. For instance, few people realize the idea of resurrection – whatever else it was – was a black swan idea in the timeline of human history. Oxford and Cambridge fellow Dr. NT Wright explains this phenomenon with his phrase “double dissimilarity” – that nothing quite like bodily resurrection existed before and nothing quite like it existed after the first century. This may seem irrelevant to some, but if the end of man in the mind of a colonized minority is a new and better body that comes after “life after death,” then death and suffering may well be wielded as a sort of armament against an oppressive empire. And so it was that group of Jewish pacifists who believed in resurrection destabilized Rome. Call it escapism if you’d like but no one will deny that they really and truly escaped exile and Roman persecution: only three hundred years later, the post colonialists became the colonizers as Constantine claimed their creed. And it’s a double testament to that old escapist idea since very seldom these days does the creed claim Constantine or his crusade. In fact come to think of it, name one empire that hasn’t cowed to that creed in the last two thousand years. I think you’ll have a hard time finding an empire that lasted longer than the creed built on the escapist idea of resurrection. You may not like Dr. Wright’s argument for the historicity of that escapist story – one or two of you reading this may well have read him thoroughly enough to argue against one or two of his points – but no one can sanely argue that this imagined (and perhaps realized) escape ended Rome in part. Caesar’s Rome hired folks like Josephus to write imprisonist propaganda. But it was the first bishop of Rome whose escapist propaganda liberated Jewish and Greco-Roman peasants. The very list in Acts 2 reads like a who’s-who of conquered and oppressed post-colonial Roman territories. All of the later classic romance and modern romance is predicated upon that one escapist story of resurrection. And whatever we mean by “the novel,” if it is truly novel, was later derived from those romances.

Fiction is escape. That’s the whole point: to tell a different story, one in which we’re less enslaved, less imprisoned, less oppressed, less orphaned and abandoned.

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Third, are imprisonists happy?

Though they may well be covered in shit, I sincerely doubt they’re happy about it. I’ve lived in New York long enough and participated in and listed to enough fiction and essay and poetry readings to easily call bullshit on this sort of literature. The happiest writers and readers I’ve met in my life are those who have at least some escapism in their lives. I’m thinking of the boys and girls that run drDoctor, in whose presence I once reversed the cover of my hardcover Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and they laughed and said, “Harry Potter’s the shit. Flip that shit back around.” On the other hand, the saddest writers and readers I have met are those who have zero escapism in their life because they have no contact with the good points of history and no contact with the good visions of a better world. They’re right, the imprisonists, to point out the danger of true naïveté because someone who has been insufficiently prepared for true malice has no preparation for when a Trump or a Mao or a Stalin comes along. Or even for when a rapist weasels his way into the nonprofit structure or worse, the family. Or still for when a cousin who seemed so happy and popular and successful decides to hang herself with your uncle’s belt. The latter two being personal examples from my own life over the last three years.

But escapism has always affirmed better visions and it’s only in recent decades that overprotective imprisonist parents have tried to shield their children from the likes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Beowulf. The same logic that insists upon a steady diet of present day glorifications of rape culture, that denies us the romance of fantasy and science fiction, also predicates the domestic decisions of over protective mothers who claim imagination is bad. One doesn’t want to lie to their kids about Santa, but rather about their own crooked fetish of whips and chains. The other doesn’t want to lie to their kids about Santa because their kids will one day encounter people wielding whips and chains and no Santa will be there to rescue them. Both of them seem ignorant that the historical Santa literally saved children from whips and chains and therefore a vision of a world with more Santas is also vision of a world where whips are meant for swinging on dungeon pillars and chains are meant for pirate anchors. Escapism doesn’t deny pain. But it also doesn’t deny miraculous healing. It makes you really wonder how these sorts of children respond when the find out that mom will one day die. Escapism handles this issue well, but does imprisonism?

It certainly claims to, but I doubt it. For the response to those who did not expect true malice in their life – for those most obsessed with the moment they “came of age” – they try to lean into their indulgence and pain as if indulgence and pain is some sort of corrective to ignorance. They seem blissfully unaware that further indulgence is ignorance of the consequences of indulgence: that gluttony is naiveté of alcohol poisoning, that pride is naiveté of imperialism, that greed is naiveté of theft and exploitation, that crimes happen when we refuse to contemplate the suffering we might cause. Writing exclusively about the bad things in life is not a solution to the horrible thing that happened to you, the horrible thing that was so horrible it surprised you. Lemony Snickett seems to understand this better than most of the imprisonists. For as David Bentley Hart said, “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence on the far end of experience.”

What seems to constantly surprise my New York colleagues and neighbors is not that I have joy. It seems to surprise them that I have joy in spite of personal betrayal, divorce, adultery, drug and gun smuggling, suicide, burglary, armed rebellion, perjury, exploitation, slavery, workaholism, hoarding, and religious hypocrisy in my family line and circle of friends. It doesn’t surprise them that I love the hell out of life. What surprises them is when they find out exactly what kind of hell I’ve loved clean out of my life. They’re not surprised I read escapism. They’re surprised I’ve escaped.

The imprisonist seems to focus only stonewalls and iron bars that do not a prison make. Escapist minds innocent and quiet take that for a hermitage. The imprisonist says that bad things happen. The escapist says no shit Sherlock, by why does anything happen at all? The imprisonists speak of trauma and the things that trigger the trauma: it speaks of the snakebite, the bombing, the rape and the armed robbery.

The escapist goes one step further by empowering the reader to turn the snakes into staves, the rape into rescuing sex slaves, the armed robbery into a disarming mythic generosity complete with a giant red bag that comes around every Christmas, the atom bomb into the device that terraforms Mars. Again, that’s not to say that these things weren’t terrible and traumatic – escapism has always admitted how awful Nagasaki is precisely because it envisioned world-consuming stars, it admitted how awful a single rape could be because it envisioned banks upon banks of women strapped to walls and used merely as vessels for bearing children, it understood armed robbery because it understood the idea of entire planets converted into debtor’s colonies, and no genre better understood a single snakebite than the genre that gave us Smaug.

The reality is this: precisely because escapism imagined these pains, these sorrows, these sins and crimes in the extreme, escapism could go a step farther than imprisonism. Imprisonism could only imagine the present prison. Escapism, though predicated upon the prison, did not stop there. It first imagined the prison. Then it imagined the warden. Then it imagined the prison system. Then it imagined every category of prison systems that could possibly exist. And then it imagined a way to escape through the mountain pass, a way to use the split atom for good and not to harm, a way to turn sorrow into mourning. Imprisonism wrote to a mouse and said the best laid schemes of mice and men gang oft agley and leave us naught but grief and pain for promised joy, considered the mouse blessed because it could only touch the present, considered itself worst because it could remember the distant past, and feared the future it could not see. Escapism remembered worlds in which the mouse’s house was not only never overturned, it imagined a world in which after loosing its house, the mouse could talk and take up a sword and fight back that imprisoning plow.

It’s no accident that one of our greatest living escapist authors wrote The Shawshank Redemption: it’s a metastory about the contrast between imprisonism and escapism. About a man who felt stuck between the prison in front of him and the beach beyond him. And Andy Dufresne sad it better than the rest of us:

Get busy living or get busy dying. Andy Dufresne: who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean.

I doubt imprisonists are happy because they have no sehnsucht: no longing for a better future world or nostalgia for the good that has been lost. The only thing they cling to is fear itself, which is the very definition of anxiety. They guess and fear. Escapists imagine and hope. It’s quite like watching a group of angry teenage white boys who don’t know what else to do other than listen to hardcore music, wear black, and crawl out their bedroom window at night. Funny enough, that too is escape. And that’s the biggest hypocrisy of it: that imprisonism too is a minor province in the world of escapism. Thanks to Patrick Rothfuss, we now have a clipping of a 1999 interview about this by The Onion with the late great Terry Pratchett:

Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.

Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.

Unfortunately, few imprisonists have thought through the handful of virtues in imprisonism literature long enough to realize that it’s escapism. And if that’s the case, they definitely haven’t looked into the neuroscience behind the need for fictional storytelling. In fact, it might be time for my imprisonist friends to read a little further afield.

Any critic or escapist reader or writer worth their salt will have read On Fairy Stories and know the argument Tolkien makes. They will have read Lewis’ Of Other Worlds and know the argument he makes. Chesterton’s Ethics of Elfland and MacDonald’s The Fantastic Imagination and the section in Biographia Literaria on the imagination and the suspension of disbelief (not to mention a great many other works like Danse Macabre and Mythopoeia and Gaiman’s talk on genre and the rest) will all have graced their bookshelves and minds. Imprisonists will have read these if they hope to ever win the argument that theirs is better and more caring and happier than escapism (but Shaw seems to imply they can’t have a point in that regard). In my experience, few even know of the existence of these texts and a great slew of others, let alone boast working familiarities with them.

It’s not up to a two-bit author like me, of course, but were I placing bets on the roulette table of our literary history I would put down all of my money but one single coin on the prediction that twenty-one generations (that is to say seven, seven, seven generations) later our progeny will look back on ours as the last gasps of a true dark age. They will see that light started to break through with the reemergence of superheros, gods, fantasies, and science fiction. For it’s not simply a correlating data point that the decline in science fiction happened in the same years as the decline in the space program nor that the decline in fantasy happened in the same years as the decline in moral leadership. And it’s neither a coincidence that both have arisen as we see again the need to explore and to develop virtue ethics so that the highest office in the nation will not in the future be held by someone quite literally as happy as a pig in shit. If there’s one thing I think we can all agree upon, it’s that Donald Trump is a man without much in the way of imagination.

But that last single coin I plan to save: it’s a magic coin and I’ll write an escapist story about it.

We’re watching the death of imprisonism literature. Though a tumor, it’s the kind of sentient monster tumor you might find in the 1982 b-movie Basket Case. Having been cut off, it’s now starting to die. I’m not sure who has the power of attorney here, but I’m suggesting palliative care and hospice: we can give it some morphine and ease its passing so that it’s painless and quick. For honestly now, where would East of Eden be without Eden itself? Where is Balzac’s Human Comedy without Dante’s Divine? Could Norris’ McTeague have ever won the lottery had not Agamemnon first laid down his helmet to hold up the lots that determined who fought Hector? Pratchett’s right: even fantasizing about Virginia Wolf applied to modern society is still, technically speaking, fantasy. It’s palliative care I’m offering here: a gentle and honest admission of what we’re all up to in the fiction world. Of what happens when any one of us imagines. Come to the dark side, imprisonist friends, where fairies feast in flamelit shadows and dragons delve in the deep.

Or, I suppose, we could let imprisonism not go gentle into that good night.

If the latter, I think it’s likely that we hear it gasp and sputter and shit its pants while the world watches awkwardly. We did offer morphine and surgery, after all. It’s likely that imprisonism will go in a very undignified way. It’s not, of course, to say that we must never write about present events. It’s simply that when the Greeks did so, they remembered the gods. When the Norse did so they remembered the mearcstapa. When the English and Chinese did so, they remembered their dragons both bad and good. Hamlet and Scrooge and Jane Eyre had their ghosts while Charlemagne and Arthur and Godfrey had their miracles. And when the first Americans wrote about present events, they remembered their world-devouring white whales, their Chinook Ship Monsters, and that one cowboy who broke tornadoes and widowmakers with an adventurer’s standard fifty feet of hempen rope.

A modern journalist might ask, “But which of these things actually happened? Which parts are autobiographical?”

But that’s only because he’s thinking like an unimaginative journalist used to deconstructing political events, talking about the weather, and proclaiming the death of Old Mister Winter. All of which, I’ll remind you, are the first draft of history.

A true fiction writer ignores all of this for the simple fact that all parts of reality – including works of fiction – are really real. Anyone denying the existence of an entire wing of the Brooklyn Public Library is not only falling into a worse delusion of grandeur than they accuse us escapists, they’re actually participating actively in the continued oppression of young minds born in Brooklyn who desperately need to imagine a world outside of million dollar blocks and underfunded, redlined schools, and gentrifying hoods. They need a dream. Why should you deny them the Kings who have it?  I’m sure The Woman Behind the New Deal would have been told that her idea of workers rights was a pipe dream – escapism – but she didn’t let that keep the entire agenda she’d written in New York State from becoming her list of demands the day FDR came calling to offer her a job. Her escapism became our forebears’ escape precisely because it didn’t have prisons in mind. I’ll defer to Dostoevsky for the final word:

“Much on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot apprehend the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away with you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That is what I think.”

—Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

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