Skip to content
@chadkoh

@chadkoh

Bellatrist, communitarian, tech contrarian. Generous with Likes.

  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Flickr
  • GoodReads
  • Letterboxd
  • About
  • Archives
  • Contact
  • Newsletter

Against “commodified fantasy”

Chad Kohalyk books, writing August 6, 2016August 5, 2016 0 Minutes

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

Sharing is caring:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • Pocket
  • Tumblr
  • WhatsApp
  • Telegram

Related

Published by Chad Kohalyk

Bellatrist, communitarian, tech contrarian. Generous with Likes. http://chadkohalyk.com View all posts by Chad Kohalyk

Published August 6, 2016August 5, 2016

Post navigation

Previous Post Minimalist wall-hangings
Next Post More people than bots?

About

Chad Kohalyk thinks and writes about the intersection of technology and politics. He has a master's degree in War Studies, and is active in the startup community. He resides in Kelowna, BC Canada, often making trips to Japan. More →

🔑 PGP Public Key for secure email.

✉️ Keep up to date with the newsletter.

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

Other ways to follow

Sign up for my monthly-ish newsletter and get updates in your mailbox, plus other goodies. You can catch me on Twitter @chadkoh.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Archives

Categories

Common topics

about apple books buddhism Canada community design downsizing economics football hilarity ideas internet Japan Kelowna kit media movies parenthood personal philosophy photography politics privacy and surveillance race review science startups tech travel

Flickr Photos

初雪初雪Daughter called me into the kitchen because the milk had gone bad. When I opened the fridgeAutumn sunset from officeChurch lighting up nature
More Photos
Create a website or blog at WordPress.com
Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.