Stop looking start seeing

Terry Pratchett continually uses the trope that people see what they want to see. When confronted with something too big, or amazing, or terrible or out of the ordinary the human mind refuses to recognize it, or amends reality till it comes up with something acceptable. In Good Omens the characters ignore the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, for acknowledging them, even when they are right in front of their face is neither convenient nor comfortable. "No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side." It is what allows characters to function, to go about their day to day activities without going insane.

Fiction is the opposite of this panacea for life's madness found on Discworld. Good fiction is not escapism but the opposite. They use the wondrous, the fantastic, faerie land as an escape into reality. It holds a mirror up to our world, but a funhouse mirror that tweaks and twists what it shows making you pay attention to details never noticed before. As Chesterton notes in the Napoleon of Notting Hill, "Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time." This is what fiction is in danger of doing, of make us see the world instead of merely looking at it.

I know that I am returning to a topic I touched on shortly after the inception of this blog and I am sorry to be repetitive. But it is something I think about a lot, for the idea of "Classics" and a literary cannon have ingrained in me that some things are more noble reads while others are fluff. I do not believe this but every once and a while I have to justify my forays into the fantastic.