Are You Living in the Real World?

Adapted from a university prelection given on a book tour of the United States.

I snatched the theme for this talk from a flier I saw in London at a children's volume circle called "Are we living in the real world? An exploration of fantasy in children's volumes today." It was hosted through Faber and Faber, and it looks to me, at least, an interesting make subordinate for discussion, with the proviso that works are, of course, a kingdom to themselves and what we say here among literate, chattering adults is not ever quite as important as what children are actually reading and enjoying and learning from. That is to say the wellsprings of great writing are not really academic, not the material of Ph.D. theses, and scarcely any writers, except perhaps the archly Victorian individuals actually begin their books knowing precisely wherefore they are doing what they are doing, or where their volumes will take them.

So-fantasy and reality? The REAL world? It appear to bes a paradox, doesn't it? It's quite obvious that a 'fantasist' isn't living in the real world and wouldn't want to, especially when they're traveling between Texas and San Francisco, Seattle and of recent origin York. How dull for Lucy or Peter or Edmund to scrabble to the back of that wardrobe and shock their heads against a lump of plywood. How depressing for Lyra to talk to her daemon alone to find that it is a well marketed cuddly toy.

The point of the journey is the fantasy. What appears impossible suddenly becomes actual. What have the appearances incredible is realized. What is completely fantastical becomes the realm of everyday experience, for the protagonists taking the journey anyway, and their loyal and wondering readers.

But wait just a moment? Is that really the lock opener to great fantasy? Simply what the writer can imagine to be possible and then give leave tos happen? Should we all be imagining the satellite to be a giant banana and sending vitamin-starved children into space to mine a novel source of fruit drinks? Lunar Smoothies. Imagination, we say to children in gymnasiums so often, like an unthinking mantra, imagination is what it's all about. And children, responsive and impressionable as they are, pick it up and nod and privily chuck away the book being peddl at them in favor of a far more exciting and immediate computer game.

But what exactly is this thing that we and Hollywood and the world insist we and kids purchase into so readily, this mysterious thing called imagination? Is it something that can be popp into a Dream-Works to bring out Willy Wonka-like, an instantly satisfying result? I don't think for a like reason and that is why the question, "Are we living in the real world," is important. It was the English romantic bards as individualistic as any serious children's writer should be, and especially Coleridge, who made the distinction between fancy, (for the point of time let's not call that fantasy), and imagination.

Fancy to Coleridge was, upon the one hand, a light, almost airy thing, the material of sugar plum fairies, of daydreams, of what you will. on the contrary imagination, now that was entirely different, something far deeper more poetic, more insightful, more powerful and visionary. And what differentiated this powerhouse called imagination from those light fancies that we all have everyday? The things we make up upon a whim. The ability of the one imagining to fully engage their mind and their emotions, their contemplations and their feelings, for as Coleridge believed "there can be no great contemplations without great feelings," with everything around them, with life itself. In short with fact as they understand it.

Bang. And we jolt our heads on the back of that wardrobe. Truth? Crikey! Harry pudder isn't true. Far from it, a certain number of Christian fundamentalists cry, and isn't it evil to talk to kids about things like magic and make it appear so wonderful? We agree, say the scientists, if not about the "evil," because there is no evil as like then at least about the nonsense of magic. And Philip Pullman, he isn't trying to compute the truth either, no more than it could be authentic that a deer could be born in thirteenth hundred Scotland with the mark of an oak leaf upon its forehead, a he is in my first novel, Fire Bringer, and talk to the animals. These are fantasies and should be accepted and take delight ined as such, and nothing more.

It is at least reassuring to writers worried about their have a title to work that, as a friend said to me one time when I was fretting about what message I was giving to children; kids are far cleverer than we think and know that "they're single stories." And if we worry about on what account children should be wasting their valuable time above "stories," rather than studying the Dow Jone Industrial Average or learning to steal nave caps, we should remember that single of the greatest of all storytellers, Robert Louis Stevenson labeled many of his have a title to deep felt works "an entertainment." And there's nothing unjust with entertainment, and "no business like exhibit business."

Except that there is something inequitable with entertainment when it's bad entertainment. When it benumbeds us with the cheap, the obvious, the formulaic and the stupid And in the world of fantasy it will be bad entertainment if nothing else but fancy rather than true imagination is engaged, without passion and vision and courage. If the writer or playwright or film maker doesn't really care about what they are doing, doesn't look for truth in their characters and their journeys and in themselves, doesn't address themes, and feelings and notions that are vitally important to us all in the everyday. Because that's what the heart and the mind, the mind if you like, desperately straits to feed and breathe and swell on. It is in fact that seemingly paradoxical tension between addressing "real life issues" in the form of fantasy, that responsibility in their art, that makes the greatest storytellers, and that sometimes agonizing tension between fantasy and the suppos real world that is the actual stuff of children's fiction.