The novel is, in all cases, the bastion of fantasy.
And really, as much as our literary examples of the whimsical betray a yen for the fantastic, so too do our more morose books - those books that detail the collapse of families due to lies and betrayals or the existential crises of characters burdened by self-inflicted woes. The human condition is fraught with every manner of depravity but it is also marked by a resilience of pleasures. All of a life is worthy of consideration for those of attentive eye. Especially as game studies begin to propagate, we’re finding more and more that play is not just fun and not just good, but important. And if escapist narrative, by its nature, ignores with braggadocio the primary concerns of the Great Writers, then certainly books suffused with the whimsical must also be suspect.īut if we’re willing at all to investigate these matters, we’ll find that this is just not a helpful way to look at things. Whimsy too is often mistaken for escapism and escapism (justly or not) has been targeted as the opponent of worthwhile artistic achievement. Serious works just feel more literary, more artistically viable. As wonderful as some of us know The House on Pooh Corner to be, it’s hard to compare Milne with the likes of Kafka, Proust, Hemmingway, Joyce, and Conrad. Whimsy doesn’t come off so well in the critical eye when compared to the towering works of the literary canon. And because it is valuable to consider the suffering that pours from its gates, we may have focused our attentions too narrowly in our search for literary worth and merit. We’ve come up against this great wall of human woe. As readers of Great Literature, we’ve become suspicious of happy endings.
Much of what are considered to be the best examples of the storytelling mediums are works that challenge the reader’s sense of the world or delve into the not-so-sunny depths of the human condition.
It’s not so much that everything should be whimsical, but more that it seems the vast majority of respected works are serious-minded, somber affairs. One of the things missing from too much of our narrative experiences is a sense of whimsy.
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