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Against “commodified fantasy”

Chad Kohalyk books, writing August 6, 2016August 5, 2016 1 Minute

From the Foreword of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea:

image displays the following 7 paragraphs of text: It's unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go “there and back again,” and “there” is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill . . . So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities. 　　And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. 　　Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable. 　　What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life—of a sort, for a while. 　　Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring. 　　We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. 　　We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo’s lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change

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Published August 6, 2016August 5, 2016

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Chad Kohalyk is a Canadian in Japan working on a book after many years in the startup world. In the past he has written much about the intersection of technology and politics. More →

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