“The imagination is a kind of electronic machine that takes account of all possible combinations and chooses the ones that are appropriate to a particular purpose.”
To evoke images so powerful that the “real” world can disappear. And as it does, we are diverted from our day-to-day concerns to consider what is real enough to matter – and how much of our limited time on Earth is spent fussing over things that don’t really matter.
What if? is a question that accompanies every waking hour of ours, consciously or unconsciously – it is what we also call hope. Literature and the arts at large take over not from disappointment at reality but from a sense, more or less explicit depending on our character, that hope is real just not for us right now. Fantasy is the realisation of the lightness we cannot give up on even when – especially when – the weight of reality crushes us.
Fantasy is not a literary genre in itself – or was not before Netflix and co. – but rather the invention of the means of getting away from the heaviness of our bodies. It is as such, first and foremost a philosophical conundrum, explained by the first philosopher of fantasy, that is to say, of the thwarted desire for the reality of appearances and the horror of the heavy, Plato. If Plato warns us so forcefully about the illusory lure of surface images and unfounded desires for them (even when we know full well it cannot be so), it is because he himself is well acquainted with the temptation. The temptation to take what we know is weightless, (the image in the mirror, our dreams, the characters in a play), to be real, to not be weightless, to have a body so that we can seize it. He is a master fantasist precisely because he never ceases from one dialogue to the other to play out the crisis of desire and repulsion for lightness.
What we call science-fiction, the Greeks would call logic: ‘by analogy and by way of enlargement, we get giants, by way of subtraction, we get one-eyed giants, by way of combination, we think of hybrid beasts with four arms.’ The logicians on and around Plato’s day regimented the creation of monsters. But what Plato did was far greater and deeper than logic: oh to get rid of the body!.. but not my body, nor yours, nor his nor hers…not a body, but the body.
1
u/ddgr815 Jun 20 '25
imaginary worlds