Escapist Poetry

I.

Verity Spott’s We Will Bury You (2017), Marie Buck’s Unsolved Mysteries (2020), and Steve Orth’s The Life & Times of Steve Orth (2020) are three collections of poetry that have recently upended the typical antagonism between politics and escapism.[1] Sharing a desire to turn from problems or situations as they really are toward scenarios that attempt to play out alternative and unlikely sequences of events, these works attest to a recent conjunction between Marxist commitment and wild phantasizing. The escapist visions they each present, however, fall short of a faraway and beautiful hope, suggesting that a redemptive or critical account of escapism on the grounds of future-oriented utopianism may no longer be salient. Pointing instead to a more novel phenomenon, these authors can be seen exercising their creative capacities at the border between two seemingly opposed yet equally austere realms: reality, with all its political impoverishments, and phantasy, which “attains nothing.”[2] A turn to escapism allows these poets to grapple with the reality of nothingness mirrored in phantasy’s very form.

While I use this essay to grasp this contemporary occurrence, I also situate it within a longer trajectory of thought, one that connects the history of escapism to the history of its critique as well as subsequent critiques of those critiques. When John Crowe Ransom first used the term in 1930 to describe American work culture, for instance, he used it to identify a “defeated and escapist people,” obsessed with productivity and scientific progress yet “afraid of the fullness of the inner life.”[3] Escapism entailed a “general illusion of personal and collective power,” but also—rather counterintuitively—an escape from interiority.[4] By the late 1970s, Ransom himself would come under attack as participating in an “escapist Fugitive movement.”[5] This time, escape meant a divorce of literature from its historical and social realities.

In a 1933 issue of The English Journal, Alfred Kreymborg brought out the closeness of escapism and poetry in particular. Those who found sympathy with T. S. Eliot were characterized by “an attempted escape from disillusionment,” while “the romantic movement had its escapists also: poets defeated or horrified by life who embraced old ivory towers and chiseled perfect stones out of their solitude.”[6] Genevieve Taggard, Louise Bogan, and Léonie Adams were all “termed escapists, or women defeated by romance,” while Marion Clinch Calkins’s apparent self-flagellation was yet “another means of escaping a world grown too stupid, common, and dull.”[7] Escapism here allowed Kreymborg to capture a reactionary mechanism both within and against the banal and traumatic “horrors” of modernity; it allowed him to define that reactionary mechanism as part of modernity itself. Two years later, the poet Stanley Burnshaw would write that Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923) is “the kind of verse that people concerned with the murderous world collapse can hardly swallow.”[8] When asked to reflect upon this statement in 1989, he explained that “to the people alert to the world of 1935, Harmonium couldn’t fail to appear as ‘escapist’ both in subject matter and in attitude.”[9]

Around the same period, Marxist critics, too, were arguing against escapism on the grounds of deception, ease, political indifference, and idealism. When Georg Lukács launched an attack on the “so-called avant-garde” writers of his time, he argued that their failure to penetrate into the totalizing aspects of reality made them only superficial foes of the bourgeoisie.[10] In response, Bertolt Brecht composed an equally aggressive critique, though on similar grounds. This time it was Lukács who had departed from reality. Lukács “starts from a sound principle, and yet one cannot help feeling that he is somewhat remote from reality,” Brecht wrote.[11] “It is the element of capitulation, of withdrawal, of Utopian idealism which still lurks in Lukács’s essays” that makes his work “unsatisfactory; for it gives the impression that what concerns him is enjoyment rather than struggle, a way of escape rather than an advance.”[12] Against an agonist art that might lead to revolution, escapist literature merely participates in a culture of false hope, consumption, and convenience.

When critics in more recent years have thought about escapism, they tend to position it against a lost pastoral writing and earlier associations of poetry with leisure. Today’s critic of escapism cringes at Edward Young’s eighteenth-century understanding of poetry as “a sweet refuge” that “gives us a respite” and Joseph Addison’s ranking of poetic imagination as a “gentle exercise” less rigorous yet more delightful than philosophy.[13] Part of this disapproval speaks to historical shifts in the conceptual alignment of leisure with bourgeois thinking. Take John Fekete’s 1977 argument that Keats’s work was an instance of vacillating “between escapism and moralizing sentimentality,” which marked an “abandonment of the effort to change the structure of reality.”[14] The critic’s choice to pinpoint Romanticism was no accident, since it was precisely during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when notions of leisure were rapidly changing and giving way to one modern notion of escapism: that escapist works are merely entertaining and therefore solutions to boredom.[15]

This critical tendency to associate escapism with boredom arises from somewhat of a paradox. The bored individual suffers from disengagement with reality, but so does escapism, its apparent solution. The emergence of boredom as a collective sentiment coincided with an increasing emphasis on the distinctions between inner and outer life. On the one hand, boredom was perceived as a failure of external reality to immediately meet certain expectations. On the other hand, it was seen as the result of poor inner resources and an inability to enjoy the contemplative life.[16] Romantic poets attempted to take a social angle to the problem of stupor, but the result was an increasing move toward the interior life as the site of rejuvenation. (Feeling came to replace the traditional role of nature in poetry, accounting for escapism’s referential shift from a physical retreat into the countryside toward a retreat into solipsism.) If nineteenth-century escapist works were merely palliatives to bourgeois or upper-class boredom, it is easy to see why they might have been politically condemnable: they would have neither altered material reality nor transformed a destitute interiority, instead distracting their audiences from both.[17]

Despite the surfacing of “escapism” as a pejorative label, there have nevertheless been two strains of thought that provide alternative readings. Ernst Bloch argued that the irrational component of escapism can in fact exceed the rational as a test of reality. Using the example of Don Quixote—arguably the most delusional utopian figure in Western literature—Bloch claimed that “it is not simply a matter of how mad we consider the Junker to be. But of how correct we consider the facts in which and against which he rides.”[18] There is a kind of a dialectical turn in what we, as modern readers, can identify as the escapism of Don Quixote. The false knight does not engage in mere escapist activity; he takes his escapism so seriously that the argument that he has “gone too far” or has become “too out of touch with reality” folds in on itself. It is the comic self-seriousness of the whole endeavor that reveals something true about the protagonist’s flight from reality: “he saw the knight-errantry of yore as nonetheless a nobler guiding image than the budding bourgeoisie.”[19] Against the description of escapist literature as falsifying, Bloch argued that it could be redeemed by giving us a picture or “blueprint” of what might be possible, of what could be (“a guiding image”) rather than what is.

If the Blochian argument for living out of sync with a dominant world-logic attempts to redeem escapism on the basis of building a Marxist “poetry of the future,” as well as on the basis that utopic visions offer critique, psychoanalysis suggests that escapism is more fundamentally and more simply inevitable. Here, it is useful to note that escapism has as its primary vehicle phantasy, a term that toggles between a psychoanalytic emphasis on the individual and a cultural phenomenon. Phantasy is one of the earliest modes of the infant’s psychic life, the first expression of human impulses of desire and aggression.[20] It is active, fundamental to the first step of doing, which is willed or unwilled wanting, as well as to the image of doing that is consequently imitated and translated (successfully or not) into reality. For the analyst, escapism can never be truly escaped.

While psychoanalysts in the twentieth century have interpreted phantasy as integral to one’s experience and testing of reality, Freud himself expressed ambivalence about the escapist’s relationship to reality.[21] In “Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” he writes that daydreaming and phantasy can “abandon dependence on real objects,” going on to say:

An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be, without following the long roundabout path of making real alterations in the external world. But he can only achieve this because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the renunciation demanded by reality, and because that dissatisfaction…is itself a part of reality.[22]

This initially appears to prove the Marxist critic’s point, since psychic reality cannot penetrate material reality, or as Freud puts it, “real alterations in the external world.” (“[The] mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs, and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery,” Freud had written in Civilization and Its Discontents.[23]) But isn’t psychic reality part of the superstructures of reality? The binary of reality and escapism, society and art would seem to be itself an effect of history, one that would have cultural production “remain a persistent if contradictory and progressively weaker and more abstract and reactionary critique of the social realm.”[24] The argument resembles Theodor Adorno’s. For Adorno, lyric poetry’s turn away from the world always retains a negative image of the reification of the world, for “it is precisely what is not social in the lyric poem that is now to become its social aspect.”[25] The feeling of a separate, subjective, and arguably illusory space created by the aesthetic always moves us because it speaks to a more encompassing, real alienation. As Joshua Kotin has observed, Adorno reads lyric poetry as an index of the injustices of the world rather than a confrontation with them.[26]

II.

One category of escapism departs from earlier assumptions by showing that contemporary poetry can be confrontational and escapist at the same time. The revenge phantasy—which shapes Verity Spott’s We Will Bury You and Marie Buck’s Unsolved Mysteries—is calculated and deliberate rather than passive. We Will Bury You consists of a series of death wishes or spells cast and imagined upon members of the British Parliament, while Unsolved Mysteries depicts various sexual and political phantasies that at times involve impossible feats. Despite, or rather precisely because of, their Marxist politics, there is a shared interest in what Spott calls “magical thinking…based on a kind of impossibility.”[27]

Composed a day after the British government voted against removing its cap on public sector pay, We Will Bury You revolves around various hexes on members of Parliament. Rather than escaping into a world where politicians are transformed into moral beings, Spott discovers in escapism a substitute to empowerment and control over the situation. In a conversation with Keston Sutherland, Spott notes that the poem arose from “the feeling of nausea,” “helplessness,” and “political impotence” that was ensuing at the time.[28] In the book, revenge allows for a substitution of these feelings with the speaker’s feeling of potency:

Tonight, whilst you lie dutifully on the ground your gut will wrench & prickle. You will shit in your bed. You will lie there, you will come out of your dreams asking for help. Lucy Allan.

[…]

Tonight is fuel is your body. Kindling. In your ribs a sudden volt of traction. A nebulous subsonic itch crashing into your salary. A careless spell catches your stars. The edge of a rib cuts into your lung. Stephen Barclay.

[…]

Tonight, whilst in your need you cry out. You cry out for someone to come to help you. All your private establishments have gone to their beds. There must be an ambulance somewhere in this long night of blades. “Come to me! Come to me!”. Silence. “Help me!”. Mr John Baron.

[…]

Tonight, as if in love you turn in your naked bed. You turn & are ripped out & aborted. Forced to swallow yourself. Sir Henry Bellingham.

(n.p.)

Sampled from various parts of the collection, these excerpts attest to how escaping one’s real political impotence into an imagined personal and collective power generates certain kinds of paradoxical situations. The first revolves around address. Spott invokes real-life addressees only to foreclose any actual responses. The fictional element of lyric apostrophe is thrown into relief. On the one hand, it is a way “to will a state of affairs, to attempt to bring it into being by asking inanimate objects to bend themselves to your desire.”[29] On the other hand, the hexes’ use of apostrophe is aimed at the elimination rather than the positing of a “potentially responsive” other.[30]

The second paradox is temporal. The poems entail a sense of futurity (“tonight”) that is recaptured from brute reality as something pleasurable, or at least just, rather than despairing. But unlike the kind of distant horizon that constitutes Bloch’s blueprint of the unrealized, Spott’s focus on the immediate future pushes back against a postponed gratification as well as any image of utopia. When “tonight” follows “tonight” with no definite end, does one see the light of day? Is this the future or the annihilation of time by desire? Hopelessness is not replaced by hope but rather a more visceral sense of anticipation—embodied rather than dependent on rational or irrational belief. “Tonight” is both the time when political work is imagined and the time the poet is afforded to do their escapist work. It quickly begins to blur with the present itself. Although nighttime is the last frontier of the capitalist workday, the poet does not restore it as a precapitalist site of rest and sleep.[31] Rather, there is a kind of prolonged, insomniac “tonight” in which Spott transforms the desire for rest into the “putting to rest” of the speaker’s oppressors.

Thirdly, escapism generates an intimacy with the very politicians who are otherwise inaccessible to most citizens. The carefully crafted nature of each hex, as a unique infliction of pain, transforms the relation between the subject and the object into something personal, even tender. In reality, the growing political indifference that arises from despair and hopelessness corresponds with politicians’ own indifference toward the working class. In the escapist phantasy, the speaker’s careful constructions force the politicians into a situation where they must care because, crucially, the phantasy is about them. It is not only the future that’s brought nearer but also the spatial arrangement of political persons. The irony of this claustrophobic escapism consists in the poet phantasizing about a situation in which there is no escape for the members of Parliament. If, in reality, the latter escape the consequences of their actions by removing themselves from the people and places their political policies affect, such detachment or distancing can no longer hold in the space of phantasy. Here, politicians are deprived of the very pleasures, comforts, and defenses that escapism typically permits.

Each of Spott’s hexes also isolates their objects from any outside help. This alienation heightens the image of the phantasy’s success, since escapism itself attempts to shun the outside to create a self-sustained nonreality. In their isolation, many of these poems end up transforming the autoerotic nature of infantile phantasy into a kind of autoimmune attack. It is often the politicians’ own bodies that turn against them: Lucy Allan’s gut wrenches her out of her dreams; the edge of one of Stephen Barclay’s ribs punctures his lung. Elsewhere, maggots are born inside Jo Churchill, and Sir Peter Bottomley becomes allergic to himself. Ironically, the poet’s entrance into and invasion of the politicians’ bodies seeks out an emotional interiority that reality lacks. The emphasis on a sick and destructive interior body reveals a broken mechanism but one that will now “work” in the “right” way. One of these ways relegates the politicians to a helpless infancy, with no control over their own bodily functions (“You will shit in your bed”). Another way forces helplessness onto them through the passive voice. When Spott writes, “You turn & are ripped out & aborted. Forced to swallow yourself. Sir Henry Bellingham,” Bellingham becomes both subject and object. The allusion to pleasurable masturbation becomes an act of horrendous cannibalism. Since, in its first stages of phantasy the infant fails to distinguish between wish and reality, one might phantasize that the phantasy appears even more real to those who are under attack. Bellingham has himself to fear.

In We Will Bury You, positive desire appears as aggression, while poetic pleasure is mingled with images of pain. Escapism no longer works through detachment, or what Freud called a “mild narcosis,” but rather an intensification of affect by way of temporal and spatial proximity. The concentration of mental and psychic energy—made evident in the eighty-eight-minute period in which Spott composed the entirety of the book—appears through the repetition of the word “will.” Spott’s use of the word evokes a phantasy of agency as well as a phantasy where word and deed are inextricably tied. The word functions in a way that is closer to the binding mechanism of the older “shall.” The more language repeats itself as a way to realize its content, the more the phantasy allows for both a recathexis and discharge of desire and agency. Spott’s desire to escape reality is not so much a desire to escape pain into numbness as it is a desire to escape numbness itself. But this intensification of feeling, through prolongment, risks becoming its own form of desensitization. The phantasy might engender and become the very situation it tries to escape.

III.

Not unlike Spott, Buck produced an escapist poetry to confront a growing sense of political “agnosticism and sadness.”[32] Inspired by the eponymous popular true crime show that features the mysterious deaths of ordinary people, Unsolved Mysteries counterintuitively connects the escapist activity of television consumption to poetic composition, a process that involves not only making decisions but also states of intense concentration, immersion, and frustration. Rather than having solipsism as its aim, escapism becomes a means toward sociality. People not only escape together but escape on behalf of one another.

In the poem “Take My Glasses Off,” the speaker says, “The world is like a lucid dream: if you notice, you can affect the scene with your will…. Which is why you become less depressed when involved in political organizing” (69). The premise is deceptive, but the emotional consequence is perhaps real, not just for the speaker but also for “you.” While watching an episode about the death of a man named Dexter Stefonek—who apparently scribbled the words “Hot Jock Shot Wad” in a public bathroom days before his death—Buck escapes into a world where everyone can “thrust into the world…shooting our hot / wads” and where the universe itself appears as “a sloppy wet mouth, / a rectum, / spit-covered labial folds, / a spongey warm pocket, / a small calloused hand” (13, 15–16). The private and solitary act of masturbation becomes an outward-facing possibility of release and freedom for everyone. When Buck watches an episode about a young teenager who disappeared and was later found to be murdered, they phantasize that she simply ran away from her oppressive small-town life “to go be queer in New York City // or to go do drugs in New York City / or to go be with a lover in New York City” (23). Here, Buck’s escapism is about another’s physical escape, suggesting that one could imagine for another person. Buck, being a queer writer in New York themself, evokes the phantasy of sharing what is good in one’s life with a dead stranger. In the speaker’s phantasy, the teenager’s escapism is not simply a form of negative freedom. It is also an escape toward love and liberation.

Throughout the book, Buck links phantasies of certain people’s deaths to reanimating and memorializing the already dead. Revenge is not a vicious cycle but promises closure. The future is tied to the past, defined only by undoing it. In their poem “Documentation,” Buck sets up a premise: because it is difficult to remember ordinary and undistinguished things in the world of Unsolved Mysteries—including the lives of the lower-class victims on the show—one should associate them with exceptional images:

For instance, if we wanted to remember Dottie Caylor, we could think of Jeff Bezos smeared with blood, lying outside of his patrol car, with the lanyard of his handgun wrapped around his ankles, handcuffs on his left wrist, the name “Robert” written on his hand, his unit’s radar cable wrapped around his neck, and a bullet wound to the head. We would picture a wide, open public space, and put this image there. We know nothing about Dottie Caylor’s life beyond her shitty husband’s account of it, so I supposed we’d be using this image of bloodied Jeff Bezos to remember the shitty account on Unsolved Mysteries. But also: Frances Yates is unambitious. If we’re going to create little fetishes for memory, I want this one to tell us more: we picture Bezos marked with red, and what it gives us, the memory it provides, is Dottie Caylor’s desires, her relationship with her pets, the feeling of her skin when she’d just moisturized it, then again when it was dry and in need of exfoliation. (59–60)

Escapism draws on the most vivid of billionaire profiles for its creative power. By attempting to use wealthy and powerful men to evoke the dead “so they will ‘come to mind at once,’” Buck tries to substitute the impoverished nature of social memory with a phantasy that is rich in content but impoverished, given phantasy’s very nature (60). Poetry, in turn, offers the additional phantasy that this substitution is possible. In “Documentation,” phantasy marks what is absent, what should be there but isn’t. It’s a kind of compensation: the poet attempts to “fill in” lost details about Caylor’s life, but reanimation remains impossible. Like Spott’s work, the details in Buck’s poem are what generate poetic pleasure, a pleasure in vividness and vitality. Yet such vital details are deeply tied to the act of mourning. The loss of Dottie Caylor is associated with a number of other losses: the loss of life to police brutality, the loss of healthcare, the loss of Bernie Sanders’s campaign. The failure of the world to recall these harms results in a desire to escape this world for one that might remember.

When Buck phantasizes about creating “little fetishes for memory”—such as erecting a monument for Caylor by placing the image of Bezos in a public square—these phantasies revolve around reversals and acts of undoing. The relation between “us” and Caylor is restored through the transformation of Bezos (a living subject) into a set of dead body parts and the reanimation of a nonliving object (Caylor’s body) into a subject. In a later poem, “Let’s Pretend Today Is Not Sunday, But a Weekday,” Buck—having discovered that they’ve been bleeding during sex—imagines that they will bring the bloodied comforter to whatever dry cleaner is advertised on Instagram:

(72)

The reification of blood results in its animation as an agent separate from its producer in the economic sphere. However, what the blood does is go out and inspire revolution, “reversing” the processes that keep capitalism running.[33] Menstrual bleeding gets transformed into an act of making the ruling class bleed through decapitation. The image of this “goopy blood” in fact plays with Marx’s own metaphors. Famously Marx compared the capitalist to a “vampire” who “thirsts for the living blood of labour.”[34] Here, Buck suggests that revolution will allow people to take back their lost blood, licking it up and tonguing it “back into the body.” Blood, once a waste product of the speaker’s body, becomes a vital element in the literal re-membering and restoration of the subject’s unalienated self. It obtains a magical function in service of a collective anti-capitalist politics.

IV.

Only on the surface does Orth’s work diverge from Spott and Buck’s, in the sense that it employs more easily recognized forms of escapist phantasy. In The Life & Times of Steve Orth, a collection of short fiction and poetry, a recurring protagonist details his life as a grocery store shift manager and aspiring writer. At work, he often daydreams: “Sometimes when I’m there at the grocery store, spacing out and power-facing the olive oil, I’ll let my mind drift away. Not too far away. Today I thought, ‘I think I’m more well-known as a grocer than a writer. Maybe even to my fellow writers in my writing community’ ” (38). (Note that the humor here lies in the phantasy that one could be “well-known” as a grocer.) During his lunch breaks, he writes poems, including one “about my money / and if there were more of it / all I would do was add a room / to my apartment, buy a fancy / video game machine and / then I’d just smoke weed, drink / Mountain Dew, and play video games / all day” (39). When he isn’t working, the narrator spends most of his time playing Candy Crush, tracking his lost order for new headphones, and escaping his mundane life by watching plenty of TV: Friends, Tanked, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Office, The Big Bang Theory, Full House, Fixer Upper, Top of the Lake, Planet Earth, Game of Thrones.

In one of the stories, “A Perfect Day for Scottie Pippen,” which is a riff on J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the protagonist starts by recounting an ordinary day. He flips through TV channels, watches some golf, gets bored, hears his cat Debra meowing, feeds his cat, grabs some Pop-Tarts, doesn’t bother toasting them, and finally lands on a semi-decent show: Naked and Afraid. After a while, he figures he should leave his house. He drives his car to 59th Street, sees NBA champion Scottie Pippen, gets out of the car, and says hi. After talking with and shooting hoops with Pippen, the protagonist goes home, opens a box in his bedroom, removes a gun, and shoots himself.

What begins as a “realistic,” ordinary day becomes a kind of escapist phantasy, although Orth’s rendering of phantasy in the same paratactic language across all scenes creates a world in which even superstars appear as banal as the narrator’s everyday life:

  I see that it’s a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. I get into my car and drive down 40th Street. I take a right on Telegraph Avenue. I drive down Telegraph for a little while, and then I take a left-hand turn on 59th Street. The park is on the right. I find a parking spot really close. I turn off the car and get out. And then I see six-time NBA champion Scottie Pippen shooting some free throws.

  Scottie passes me the ball once I step onto the court. I dribble a little bit and then airball a three-pointer. The ball rolls into the grass where we let it sit. Scottie walks up to me. We high five. (35)

Recalling the typical male, adolescent phantasy of feats on the sporting field, the phantasy revolves around bathos (think: “airball”) rather than transcendence. We never get the sense that the unexpected happens to the narrator. Even exciting things don’t appear exciting in the narrator’s phantasies. Has escapism itself become boring? This seems to be the case when the act of suicide that ends the story is the ultimate bathetic act. Before shooting himself, the narrator tries and fails to get his cat’s attention. He forces out “a small sigh” and fires a bullet. In this world, a bang and a whimper are the same ending. Committing suicide puts an end to the character’s stupor, but it also translates his nonfeeling into literal nonbeing. That the story’s ending is modeled off Salinger’s further deprives the character of any agency: even his phantasy is predetermined.

In Orth’s world, working-class people don’t just have shoddier lives compared to the rich. They even have shoddier forms of escapism, hence, “I’ll let my mind drift away. Not too far away.” When the narrator is eating his untoasted Pop-Tarts, the most he can think is that they “are a little dry, and I wish I had gotten myself a drink. Maybe some water or juice. But it is not unbearably dry” (33). The funniest example occurs when the protagonist starts watching Naked and Afraid, a reality show that arguably allows viewers to “escape” capitalist modernity by putting two naked strangers in a jungle and asking them to survive via “hunter and gatherer” means. Here, Orth’s character is meant to escape into a world that is more exciting because it reminds us of escaping real predators. Pitifully, the viewer only escapes boredom by imagining how, in this show, “there is still a lot of stuff to do, like find and kill an animal to eat” (34).

Then there is the fact that it is not even Michael Jordan who occupies this escapist world. Rather, the person whom the protagonist can mentally access is Scottie Pippen, famous for being second to Jordan and for coming from a working-class background. Still, it is Pippen who has the “best night of my life” and who relays his superior phantasy to the main character:

“…I dropped acid, and then I took some X.”

“What’s X?”

“Ecstasy.”

“I think ecstasy is called E.”

“Not this stuff. It’s called X. Way more hardcore than E.”

“Is it pretty hardcore?”

“It’s very hardcore. Very, very hardcore.”

“What did it feel like?”

“I felt like I was dancing, even though I was sitting. I felt like I was dancing on strawberry ice cream and there was moon juice coming out of my pores. And, you know, moon juice is pretty thick, like maple-syrup thick. And then I could levitate. Like periodically. And I’m like okay. That’s exactly how it felt.”

“That sounds cool.”

“And then I, I swear to god, I time traveled. Like, I blacked out for a pretty long while. And when I woke, I had been transformed into a pharaoh, a fucking pharaoh. I knew I was a pharaoh because I no longer had any desire to wear a shirt.”

“Pharaohs don’t wear shirts?”

“No, we don’t.”

“So you’re still a pharaoh right now?”

“As we speak.” (35–36)

In addition to giving his protagonist a rather “stuplime” experience, one that simultaneously elevates and absurdifies his encounter with Pippen, Orth playfully reworks the genre of the “stoner comedy,” in which a typically high audience can relax while watching someone on screen (who is usually also high) have incredible and fun experiences.[35] The humor here, however, relies on a rather sober protagonist, who, despite phantasizing this whole scenario, has to listen to the plotless happenings of Pippen’s night. Pippen’s drug adventures are funny because we know they sound boring to the protagonist, because telling the story of being high is like recounting one’s dream or phantasy to someone else—there is no actual arc, consequence, or development. No one really cares.

Significantly, Orth’s phantasy revolves around access to experience rather than experience itself. Escapism is mediated through the celebrity. The NBA star’s Ecstasy is so much “more hardcore” it gets a different name, however idiotically (“X” instead of “E”). Even more importantly, Pippen’s phantasy becomes real. He is “still” a pharaoh after his drug trip and time travel. The return to a “naked” stage of humanity where one doesn’t have to wear a shirt actually gets realized for Pippen in the “now.” What is really being phantasized, then, is a phantasy where phantasy can become real. Yet the imagined “I” cannot access this phantasy himself. The politics of escapism in The Life & Times of Steve Orth is precisely how reality curbs and short shrifts the narrator’s imagination, so much so that the author must displace his phantasy onto the twice-removed character of Pippen.

If hanging out with Pippen represents the clichéd phantasy of male bonding, elsewhere in the book, Orth satirizes the phantasy of one’s own death. In the poem “My Death,” Orth does not pursue revolutionary martyrdom but rather the classic phantasy of being a voyeur at one’s own funeral:

(81)

It is Orth’s emphasis on the fickle and the trivial that gives the poem a “ha ha” effect while belying the real triviality of most people’s lives, dreams, and deaths. What does it mean that mere “irritation” sways the speaker away from thoughts of dying? The phantasy betrays the danger that there is not much to live or die for in the first place. The line “If it were possible to die from depression” is a dark take on possibility. At the same time, Orth evokes Elton John’s elegy for Marilyn Monroe. The working-class woman’s phantasy of being “discovered” and becoming rich and famous ends up generating its own idealization of death in Orth’s poem. When the speaker phantasizes about being the central figure in “Candle in the Wind,” what he really desires is firstly, a tragic death (since a tragic death is always more moving than a “regular” death) and secondly, an important death. It is the desire to matter that is even more potent here than the desire for a good death, let alone a good life.

V.

In an interview for Chicago Review, Buck quotes the gay artist and activist David Wojnarowicz: “At least in my ungoverned imagination,” he says, “I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw congressman William Dannemeyer off the empire state building.”[36] In his phrase “at least,” Wojnarowicz reveals a key facet of escapism in the works discussed. If phantasy provides a space for “at least,” it is valuable because it is the last defense against crushing realities in the name of goodness or pleasure. But it is also a kind of bare minimum that can reflect a cynical reality. How “good” is this goodness? The escapist cannot claim or change reality, so he claims his imagination as the next best thing. Phantasy, in this case, is a marginal space that is held out against an overwhelming reality. But its minimal nature (“at the very least”) is telling. It is the bare minimum that reflects the austerity of what remains outside of it, hence the paradox that in this minimal space, maximalist and intricate phantasies can erupt under pressure, into either a form of violence or total bathos.

In a blog post, Spott too uses the phrase “at least” while discussing the Left’s urgent need for new protest slogans: “The last couple of times [at protests] I’ve tried to get people shouting ‘Theresa May will die today’ because at least that is some kind of fucking spell even though it is obviously shit.” Here, the poet attempts to place the phantasy of We Will Bury You at the center of political reality. The result? “You get these weird looks from people like you have the wrong kind of shit in your mouth, and then it goes back to the same old dum dee dum nothingness.”[37]

It is difficult to see how any of these works fit into a Blochian project of hope. It is too optimistic to think they are themselves optimistic or even in the business of providing false hope. If hope entails waiting, Spott and Orth both eclipse that temporal horizon (with the Pippen phantasy involving time travel backward rather than forward). Even when Buck phantasizes about the aftermath of revolution, it is largely bound to a desire to undo the past as well as a revenge model that emphasizes resolution and closure over an open-horizon utopia. In Spott’s book, this revenge is repetitive and recursive. The importance of repetition in all three works—rewatching old episodes, restating “tonight,” and returning daily to work—is itself an attempt to play out sameness with minor differences. The past is more Bergsonian in this sense, never gone but contemporaneous with the present. Escapism moves sideways, not beyond. At the same time, there are phantasies of reversible time, the time of the dead, the elimination of time to stop a predetermined or predictable tomorrow.

In an email conversation with Orth, I asked him about the relationship of his writing to reality. He responded by saying, “I don’t have much interest in reality or being realistic. I don’t want my writing to be confined to what has happened or will happen.” In both realms—writing and reality—“anything can happen, but a lot of times, nothing does.” This nothingness, which is reflected in the bathos of Orth’s phantasy content and the nature of phantasy itself, ends up pointing us to real political stagnation. When Orth’s protagonist jots down a poem about what he would do if he were rich, his image of escape and liberation is a prolonged reiteration of his present hobbies, which allow him to escape from the reality of being a minimum- wage worker. The character’s socioeconomic reality defines even his apparent solution to escaping that reality.

Rather than offering hope, escapist phantasies instead seem to negotiate the reality of nothingness that is mirrored in their own form. In a way, these escapist works might be seen as failures—not because they don’t transform their fictions into realities, but because their fictions are constantly conditioned by reality. Yet it is a banal fact that something is still at work that keeps these writers writing. While the politics of phantasy does not lie in its downstream political impact, there is nevertheless a struggle with a larger political reality. That this struggle takes place in an escapist world is significant, since phantasies are no longer about easily fleeing situations but about experiencing reality where it can be felt as something else: frustrating, just, funny, even delusional.

For Orth, political reality renders both everyday struggles and their escapist solutions diminutive. It is the helpless shift from expectation into nothingness, the deflation of protest into mere annoyance or world-weariness, that manifests itself in the work as if to say: the trivial near-nothingness of one’s habit-ridden life can erupt into the most outrageous phantasies, which are in turn simply that—phantasies. True phantasies are never funny for the one who escapes into them; they are supposed to be intensely private. Yet humor in Orth’s collection works as a form of solidarity and cliché. We laugh because we recognize a shared experience of having to bear a certain political reality that often doesn’t allow us to even struggle with it in a meaningful way. What is unreal is also all too real.

For Spott, escapism is ironically the site where one desires antagonism. Spott’s phantasy protests a society that assimilates, absorbs, and neutralizes its antagonistic contents. The real struggle is not between the speaker and the politician or the artist and the society. Rather, it is between an antagonism within such terms and the mere reversal of roles such that no antagonism is possible. A work like We Will Bury You wrestles with the very nature and structure of its own model of revenge. Buck’s collection, too, raises this question when the poet merely turns the problem of capital’s absorption of art into art’s absorption of capital. Jeff Bezos is the poetic speaker’s problem and their solution. One can phantasize that there is a resolution to class conflict, but this resolution is achieved in a way that approaches a deus ex machina.

The works of Spott, Buck, and Orth ask us to question whether earlier justifications for or against escapism still track the projects of writers today. But more than that, they call into question those very binaries of political engagement and escapist withdrawal, the idea that hope is the foundation for action (because it is an instigator or direct cause of it), and the relationship between imagined actions and real ones. Spott, Buck, and Orth give us the names of people who exist in real life; they also present extravagant forms of magic. They give us the past; they also give us the reanimation of that past into a present that is unreal and defies the laws of possibility. “It is the element of capitulation, of withdrawal, of Utopian idealism which still lurks in Lukács’s essays” that makes his work “unsatisfactory,” Brecht complained about his fellow writer. But the same could be said of reality, for the works here show that dissatisfaction is precisely what is being grappled with by way of escapism. These phantasies know that what satisfactions they offer are, in the end, even in the phantasies themselves, not so satisfying. Yet they offer brief and at times intense moments of affective engagement, even if that engagement takes the form of a laugh, let out only to evaporate into an emptiness. When escapism is a symptom of reality, it longs to escape from that very condition, often in the form of reversing causality, as if reality could be the effect rather than the cause of phantasy. If it is difficult to fully critique or redeem these projects, it is also their ambivalent statuses that give us time to contend with what we want and expect from art and life, and what form that desire takes. Maybe the question is not whether escapism can be justified but what escapism justifies for us.
 
 
Notes:

[1] Verity Spott, We Will Bury You (Surrey: Veer Books, 2017); Marie Buck, Unsolved Mysteries (New York: Roof Books, 2020); Steve Orth, The Life & Times of Steve Orth (Oakland: Dogpark Collective, 2020). These books will be cited in text for the remainder of the essay.
[2] Sigmund Freud argued that one can try to sever all links and mentally “re-create the world,” but that “whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out upon this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1961), 31.
[3] John Crowe Ransom, God without Thunder, an Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1930), 178.
[4] Lars Konzack, “Escapism,” in The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds, ed. Mark Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2018), 246.
[5] John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (London: Routledge, 2014 [1977]), 45.
[6] Alfred Kreymborg, “American Poetry after the War. I,” The English Journal 22, no. 3 (March 1933): 178–80.
[7] Kreymborg, “American Poetry after the War. II,” The English Journal 22, no. 4 (April 1933): 268–69.
[8] Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, “An Interview with Stanley Burnshaw,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal 13, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 115.
[9] Filreis and Teres, “An Interview,” 115.
[10] Georg Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso Books, 1980), 29.
[11] Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” in Aesthetics and Politics, 68.
[12] Brecht, “Against Georg Lukács,” 68.
[13] Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in Critical Theory Since Plato, 3rd edition, ed. Hazard Adams (Boston: Wadsworth Publishing, 2005), 338; Joseph Addison, The Spectator, vol. 3., ed. Gregory Smith (London: Everyman’s Library, 1945), 278.
[14] Fekete, The Critical Twilight, 6.
[15] Fekete also critiques the Symbolists of the late nineteenth century along with the Romantics.
[16] See Patricia Meyer Spacks’s Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[17] Ernst Bloch attributes boredom to the rich: “this affluence causes a quite specific producer of more mature, now sedate wishes to appear: instead of deprivation—boredom. No speed, no luxury, no coast however blue, helps to escape it.” He continues: “In its more modern form this escape attempt turns away from mere fat capital towards snobbery. Or even towards eccentricity.” Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 34. Fast-forward over a century, and this train of thought is still evident. In a 2015 review of Ben Fama’s collection Fantasy, Nicky Tiso argues that lines like “I think I’m in love with the world of billboards and magazines” and “Celebrity impersonators / Soba noodles / Salmon wraps / Sushi rolls” are “fantasies borne of the cultural logic of late capital, not outside it: fantasies of popularity, wealth, youth, sex, and glamour.” She attributes these fantasies to the voice of a “meaningless bourgeois retro haute leftist nihilist first-person young adult,” who, rather than undertaking what Tiso calls “affiliation or engagement,” remains nonchalant. By contrast, Steven Zultanski describes the same collection as playing precisely “with what it [is] critiquing—high fashion, celebrity worship, the gig economy, posting—getting as close as possible to its subject matter at the risk of becoming identical with it, in order to find emotional nuance in cultural logics that appear monolithic and empty.” In one case, Fantasy is a work that arises from boredom and presents weak escapist imagery without caring about effecting change. In another, it is a work that only appears to be complicit in consumerism but in fact isn’t and is thus able to contend with the milieu’s “emptiness.” Both views see phantasy (and what I would call the escapisms of late capitalism) and critique as incompatible. Which side one takes ultimately depends on whether one reads Fantasy not only as ironic but also as genuinely ironic, where irony is a distancing tool that leads to engaged critique rather than mere depersonalization. See Nicky Tiso, “REVIEW: Fantasy by Ben Fama,” The Volta Blog, September 28, 2015, https://thevoltablog.wordpress.com/2015/09/28/review-fantasy-by-ben-fama/; and Steven Zultanski, “Steven Zultanski Reviews Five New Experimental Poetry Collections,” Frieze, March 28, 2019, https://www.frieze.com/article/steven-zultanski-reviews-five-new-experimental-poetry-collections.
[18] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 1048.
[19] Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, 1046.
[20] Kleinians and Freudians generally share similar views about phantasy, including its mediation between the conscious and unconscious, its incorporation of impulses and defenses, and an interest in universal “primal” phantasies. However, Freudians “posit fantasy as dependent on the capacity to distinguish between fantasy and reality, as constructed rather than endogenous, as utilizing experience in its genesis, and as connected to memories of real events.” Kleinians, by contrast, situate phantasy in the earliest stage of infancy, making it responsible for many higher mental functions. Freudians consider phantasy to be unconscious when it has undergone either primary or secondary repression, whereas Kleinians view phantasy to be unconscious independently of any repression. See On Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” eds. Ethel Spector Person, Peter Fonagy, and Sérvulo Figueira (London: Karnac Books, 2013), xiii.
[21] Susan Isaacs writes, “phantasy enters into the earliest development of the ego in its relation to reality, and supports the testing of reality and the development of knowledge of the external world…reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and supporting unconscious phantasies.” Susan Isaacs, “The Nature and Function of Phantasy,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 29 (1948): 93–94.
[22] Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 222–24.
[23] Freud, Civilization, 31.
[24] Fekete, The Critical Twilight, 8.
[25] Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 42.
[26] Joshua Kotin, “Poems that Kill,” in Critical Inquiry 47, no. 3 (2021): 456–76.
[27] Verity Spott, “A conversation with Verity Spott – part 2” by fred spoliar, Spam Plaza, March 26, 2021, accessed July 1, 2021, https://www.spamzine.co.uk/post/feature-a-conversation-with-verity-spott-part-2.
[28] Verity Spott, “Keston Sutherland & Verity Spott discuss ‘We Will Bury You,’” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXURFEBA8Y, December 3, 2020, 10:12, 17:58.
[29] Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 215.
[30] Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 216.
[31] See Chapter 10, “The Working Day,” in Marx’s Capital. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976).
[32] Marie Buck, “Interview with Marie Buck,” interview by Brian Whitener, Chicago Review, April 23, 2021, accessed July 1, 2021, https://www.chicagoreview.org/interview-with-marie-buck/.
[33] Psychoanalytically speaking, the revenge model Spott and Buck employ represents a fundamental structure of phantasy which relies on reversals. This is evident in classic psychoanalytic examples where subjects that imagine performing an act on an object may end up receiving the act, or where the imagined action is replaced by an antonymic act.
[34] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 367.
[35] On “stuplimity,” see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 280.
[36] Buck, “Interview with Marie Buck,” Chicago Review.
[37] Verity Spott, “Poetics of Protest,” in Two Torn Halves, June 14, 2017, accessed July 1, 2021, http://twotornhalves.blogspot.com/2017/06/poetics-of-protest.html. Emphasis mine.