Thoughts on Grimdark

I’ve been trying to wrestle some minimal cogency into an account of Joe Abercrombie’s writing, but am finding it tricky. I know Joe: he’s a smart and charming man, and when he writes Fantasy he does so smartly, with great charm, although his mode of Fantasy is Grimdark: violence, torture, a Machiavellian sense of power-plays behind the façade of society and civilization: homo homini lupus, the randomness of fate, ‘good’ characters as liable to end badly and the bad to triumph as vice versa—though there aren’t really any ‘good’ characters in Abercrombie’s books: even the most likeable are conflicted, have darkness in their past, murder on their conscience. This, Grimdark more broadly, is, we might say, part of that reaction against the heroic, idealised Fantasy world of the Tolkienian or Lewisian tradition—war as chivalry, medieval life as an enchanted, beautiful realm, evil an externalized quantity that can be valiantly combatted. A very different weltanschauung. Here’s Dorothy L Sayers, talking of the Song of Roland, which she translated:

And so Roland rides out, into that new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged) but which has perhaps a better right than the blown summer of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-birth. It is also a world full of blood and grief and death and naked brutality, but also of frank emotions, innocent simplicities and abounding self-confidence—and world with which we have so utterly lost touch that we have fallen into using the words “feudal” and “medieval” as mere epithets for outer darkness. Anyone who sees gleams of brightness in that world is accused of romantic nostalgia for a Golden Age that never existed, But the figure of Roland stands there to give us the lie: he is the Young Age as that age saw itself. Compared with him, the space-adventurers and glamour-boys of our times, no less than the hardened toughs of Renaissance epic, seem to have been born middle-aged. [Dorothy L Sayers, ‘Introduction’, The Song of Roland (Penguin 1957), 17]

Grimdark is not having this. The ‘real’ middle ages were, it says, shitty, ghastly, horrible, violent, debasing, and Fantasy set in an imaginary version of the middle ages ought to rub the reader’s face in that. Mention no ideal except to undermine it; talk of honour only as hypocrisy, of generosity and loyalty as null categories. The only currency is power, and power licenses all. Grimdark will contain young characters, but itself it is old: battle-scarred, weary, cynical, ‘middle aged’ in the sense Sayers uses.

One of the arguments I am developing in my ongoing ‘History of Fantasy’ is that the genre first properly coalesced in the 1920s, when a number of writers worked traditions of 19th-century Arthuriana, stories of fairyland and the neo-Romance inventions of William Morris into a distinctive form: adventure tales set in imaginary lands, bourgeois disenchanted ‘moderns’ move into realms of wonder and magic, perilous and beautiful places. This is to develop Alan Jacobs’ persuasive argument that Fantasy mediates a ‘safe’ form of de-buffering of the self, a re-enchantment. Jacobs quotes Charles Taylor, from his huge 2007 book A Secular Age (‘one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world ... in which these [magical] forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed’), adding:

As Taylor makes clear, the shift from a porous to a buffered self involves a complex series of exchanges. But to put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.

The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).

In these circumstances, one might expect people to ask whether so difficult and costly an exchange is in fact necessary. Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.

Jacobs is talking about ‘Fantasy’ in the contemporary generic sense, not the older sense in which Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and Beowulf are fantastical. I find his account very helpful.

We are talking about stories in which magic is real, glamour in the old sense prevails, adventure beckons to restore us to wholeness, and war is chivalric splendour, an honourable and marvellous. It is not surprising that so many people who experienced the mechanised unglamour of World War One, depersonalised mass-slaughter, the crush and horror of modernity intersecting with warfare, wrote stories that retreated into an idealised historical fantasy of what war might be. Tolkien and C S Lewis both fought on the Western Front (though Lord of the Rings, due to its long gestation, wasn’t published until 1954-55, overlapping with the issue of Lewis’s seven Narnia books, 1950-56) as did Lord Dunsany, and Robert Graves (whose The White Goddess is a mode of Fantasy, a mythopoeic work that seeks to locate the world’s re-enchantment in its titular figure) and David Jones, who reworked the terrible personal experience of the Somme by recasting it as a confluence of Arthurian and Greek-Heroic war in In Parenthensis. Others who  didn’t see active service were still effected by the war, and reacted against it: as with E R Eddison whose stylised archaic romance The Worm Ouroboros (1922) takes a romanticised, heroized view of the war its two conflicting races fight across its Fantasy realm, battle as a glorious chivalric game; or Hope Mirrlees’ wonderful Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

Now, one question my History must address—though I’m not sure I have the answer—is why these texts, moderately successful (or, as with Tolkien and Lewis, nascent) in the 1920s, had to wait until the late 1960s and 1970s to achieve global fame and kick off the boom in Fantasy writing in which we still find ourselves today. The specific triggers for the reflorescence was Tolkien as a campus hit in the 1960s turning into an international bestseller, and the Ballantine ‘Adult Fantasy List’ (1969-74), which reprinted all these earlier Fantasy novels, many others of a similar vintage, and disseminated them to a eager new audience, creating the market conditions for new books written in that mode to emerge. But why did it take four decades for this to happen? (I have a tentative answer, but I’m not sure of it—to do with WW2, and the generation that followed it, and then Vietnam and 1960s counter-culture—but there isn’t space to get into all that here.)

So here's another question. Tolkien's 1954-55 title enjoyed its global boost in the 1960s, and by the 1970s and 1980s a million reprints and imitation-Tolkien novels were appearing. In the first instance, Grimdark was a reaction against this, as per Moorcock’s sneering dismissal of Lord of the Rings (‘Winnie the Pooh for grown-ups’—though I must say, actually, that’s never struck me as the withering put-down it’s taken as being: Winnie the Pooh is a masterpiece and ‘Winnie the Pooh for grown-ups’ a great thing). Moorcock trashes not just Tolkien but the whole new world of Tolkienian Fantasy as cosy, bourgeois escapism, naif and childish. The thrust of Moorcock’s attack is: fantasy ought to be more mature, more ‘realistic’, more attuned to the actualities of medieval or Early Modern politics, warfare and society.

We might ask: but why? We might demur from a logic that equates ‘childhood’ with worthlessness, and ‘adulthood’ with value. We might, moreover, simply point out that this hyper-violent, sexually explicit horrorshow vision of the world is just as generic, as bound by its conventions, as the other. It misnames this to call it ‘more realistic’. Here’s what I wrote in another place about the shift to what we might call ‘Grimdark Spy Fiction’.

There's an interesting essay to be written, I think, about the way our age likes to take any given idealised fantasy of elegance, or empowerment, or escape, or supercompetence and rub its nose in the dirt. I'm talking about the shift away from stories of Tolkienesque pre-raphaelite grace and beauty towards stories of G R R Martin grimness, darkness, cynicism and horror. Or the way Batman no longer 'works' as primary-coloured larking about and must instead be darkly knighted. Or, to come closer to the matter of the book under discussion [Anthony Burgess’s Tremor of Intent], the way spy stories no longer 'work' as Roger Moore in a polyester whistle, exotic holidays with a bit of artfully rendered nookie on the side, interspersed with some balletically choreographed fisticuffs and running-around. Now the reboot is on the other refit: Daniel Craig, tied to a chair, must scowl toughly whilst heavies thwack him in the testicles with a lead weight. Now the audience must be made to feel as if every punch is connecting with bone, must see blood and torment and the misery of the beaten. We can't say that what was once 'mere escapism' is now 'dark and realistic', because there's nothing realistic about new Bond, Bourne, Dark Knight or any of them. They are all still exercises in aesthetic convention, not pure mimesis; still predicated on the mendacity that violence is thrilling and 'gets results', rather than the much more dramatically inert truth that violence is distressing and destructive, as damaging to the perpetrator's psyche as to the victim's body and mind. The mendacity that spying is an adventure, rather than a boring dayjob, 50% admin, 30% sitting tediously around, 5% meetings with line managers and the rest drink. I don't want to labour this point. If you watch Octopussy and haughtily comment that ‘real spywork is nothing like this’ your interlocutor will of course agree. If you watch Skyfall and say the same thing, you're more likely to be deprecated for spoiling everyone's fun. Yet Skyfall is precisely as far removed from actual spying as the earlier movie, the one in which Swedish supermodel Maud Adams plays an Indian begum and MI6 has bugged the world's supply of Fabergé eggs. Indeed, since people in real life laugh a lot, and since the Octopussy at least achieves a degree of humour, it is arguably more ‘life-like’ than the ponderously earnest Daniel Craig film. The point being, real is not the deal these texts offer us, not what we go to them for. Real is a salient only insofar as we want these texts not to flaunt too openly that there's nothing real about them.

In the aftermath of first great vogue for Lord of the Rings, and the Ballantine’s List, much Fantasy was published (Brook’s Shannara series for instance) replicating the older, idealized logic; but the Grimdark reaction set-in early. The setting of Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books (the first three were 1977-79), ‘the Land’, is exactly as beautiful and enchanted and wondrous as any classic Fantasyland, but Donaldson sets it up in order to introduce a character from our world, the leprous Covenant, whose first action is to rape the young woman who heals him with her magic. The actual term ‘Grimdark’ comes from the Warhammer table-top miniature wargame franchise (1983), or specifically from the science-fictional spin-off, Warhammer 40,000 (1987) that elaborates a violent, gloomy cosmos in which progress has ceased, and human civilisation is in a state of total war with hostile alien races and occult forces. To quote the game's slogan: ‘in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.’ The gaming origin of the term is significant: a wargame needs a war environment in which to operate; writing novels in such a franchise means that plot becomes determined by war, violence and pessimism. This spread by degrees through Fantasy writing across the decade. David Gemmell’s much-loved Legend (1984) is darkling, though not entirely grim—honour, courage and duty still have some meaning in this violent, bellicose world. Glen Cook’s Black Company books (1984-5) are grimmer, and by the 1990s the dark had fully engrimmened: Paul Kearney’s Monarchies of God appeared in 1995, Martin’s first Westeros novel Game of Thrones in 1996, Stan Nicholl’s Orcs: First Blood in 1999, and so through to the present century: Mark Lawrence, Richard Morgan’s elvish books, M D Lachlan's wolfish trilogy and Lord Grimdark himself, Abercrombie.

The question, then, is what these kinds of texts offer us, why so many are drawn to them; and the more particular question what they do for Fantasy as a mode. If my ‘History of Fantasy’ thesis is that we go to this kind of writing to re-enchant our disenchanted, constrained, bourgeois modernity, to put us in touch with something transcendent, wondrous, transporting, marvelous, then what is the appeal of Grimdark Fantasy? One might wish to escape the dreariness of modernity and live in Middle Earth; what kind of a person would want to live in Westeros? This Hobbesian nightmare, life nasty brutish and short, as escapism? Really?

One answer might be that what constrains us, under the logic of modernity, is Freud’s ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, and that the point of Westeros is that it is an imaginative space in which we can shuck off those superego restrictions, can kill, rape, monster, light-out unconstrainedly. But I don’t think that’s right. In Song of Ice and Fire that is indeed what the bad characters do, but the heart of the novels are characters trying to live according to a code, and struggling in a brutal world; characters moved by love and loyalty, by hope and ideals, however battered-about and betrayed and compromised. Ultimately, the story is a story of peoples overcoming their intertribal hostility and fighting to unite against a common enemy that is the literal embodiment of death. It’s just that the world in which these people move is one of incessant friction, of suffering and death. We could say that this is a way of making the story more dramatically interesting—greater conflict leading to greater storytelling excitement. Martin is famous for writing characters upon whom people focus, follow, believe to be central to the developing story only to kill them off abruptly and unexpectedly. It’s a kind of focus pull: you thought this story was about him? Wrong! He’s gone! Look again. It’s dramatically very effective, and Martin does it well, although he perhaps pulls on this particular storytelling lever a little too often. Abecrombie isn’t as interested in this pull-the-rug-from under-the-reader’s-feet game, although he is expert at generating narrative momentum, and good at creating core characters with whom his readers identify and love. But those characters have hardly shuffled off the chains of civilisations discontents. They are, on the contrary, mostly deeply discontented, conscience-stricken, troubled by their past and present actions.

Violence is an intensity, and perhaps it is as simple as that: that Grimdark offers us these crude, pseudo-somatic intensities in place of the sublimities and enchantments of classic Fantasy—transport and magic are also intensities, but ones we are no longer able to access or apprehend. I don’t know if that’s true though.

The medieval-esque world of Abercrombie’s ‘First Law’ trilogy [The Blade Itself (2006), Before They Are Hanged (2007) and Last Argument of Kings (2008)] was once inhabited by demons and human beings both, until a great wizard called Euz expelled all demons to a dimension on ‘the other side’. Connections with this dimension exist, and it powers such magic as still operates in the human world, but the ‘first law’ of the series title was laid-down by Euz himself: ‘It is forbidden to touch the Other Side direct.’ Naturally this law is not scrupulously observed.

The trilogy brings together a clutch of characters. Logen Ninefingers is a hard-bitten northland barbarian, worn-out and wary. Then there is brattish, selfish, young aristocrat Captain Jezal dan Luthar, proud of his fencing skills but vain and inexperienced, and the crippled torturer Inquisitor Glokta. Glotka serves ‘the Union’, centred on the decadent city of Ardua, a version of Early Modern Europe. The Union is threatened by war from the barbarian North and, to the south, in the quasi-oriental Gurkish Empire. During the trilogy, as war breaks out all over, a wizard called Bayaz—more powerful than his shlubby outward appearance implies—attempts to use the situation to his own purposes. His plan is to vanquishing the dark mage who founded Adua in the distant past. Ninefingers takes Falstaff’s view of war, not Harry Hotspur:

“What’s a battle like?” [Jezal] asked.

“Battles are like men. No two are ever quite the same.”

“How do you mean?”

“Imagine waking up at night to hear a crashing and a shouting, scrambling out of your tent into the snow with your trousers falling down, to see men all around you killing one another. Nothing but moonlight to see by, no clue who’re enemies and who’re friends, no weapon to fight with.’

“Confusing,” said Jezal.

“No doubt. Or imagine crawling in the mid between the stomping boots, trying to get away but not knowing where to go with an arrow in your back and a sword cut across your arse, squealing like a pig.”

“Painful,” agreed Jezal.

“Very. Or imagine standing in a circle of shield no more than ten strides across, all held my men roaring their loudest …”

“Hmm,” murmured Jezal. Ninefingers smiled. [Before They Are Hanged, 211]

Abercrombie paces exceptionally well, does not overladen his text with worldbuilding specifics or lore. He is moreover a very witty writer, whose humour leavens the lumpishness of standard Fantasy seriousness. There is a good deal of violence, swearing and sex in these stories, but also a winning panache. A mixture of wormwood and verdigris, as Shelley described Byron's Don Juan.

Abercrombie’s approach to his world is as a lens on genre as much as on socio-cultural difference, and he is not a slave to worldbuilding consistency or hobgoblin-of-little-mindishness. Best Served Cold (2009) is set in the same imagined Fantasyland as the ‘First Law’ trilogy, but in a different corner that essays not medieval Europre but Renaissance Italy, elegance and cruelty, plots and (as the title suggests) revenge. Red Country (2012) another follow-up in the same world, is actually a kind of Western, owing much to the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven. And the most recent ‘Age of Madness’ trilogy [A Little Hatred (2019), The Trouble With Peace (2020) and The Wisdom of Crowds (2021)] takes us into the Union’s future via an ongoing industrial revolution. Abercrombie, here, is knocking on the door of the divide between our modern world and the pre-modern past that is the structuring logic of Fantasy as such. The ‘Madness’ books pick up the next generation, the children of the characters from ‘First Law’, though the pace of technological change seems improbably concertinaed (the original trilogy doesn’t even possess cannons; yet here are manufactories and ironworks, steam engines, chimneys everywhere). When an equivalent to the French Revolution sweeps the continent it seems strange that the immensely powerful wizard Bayaz does not use his magic to avert it. But magic and demons, still notionally part of the storyworld, are diminishments in these later books, and that may be the point. The logic of Grimdark is that of redisenchantment, and these books follow that through. They do seem to me lesser works, compared with Abercrombie's ‘First Law’ throuple of books and especally the standalone follow-up The Heroes (2011). But there's no question that Abercombie is a major figure in contemporary Fantasy, which in turn restages the question.

Moorcock's considers Tolkien not only ideologically noisome but childish. And there is, I suppose, a sense underlying Grimdark that it takes a less infantile, less illusioned version of its matter. As if to say: kids might be satisfied with these stories of wonder and grace, these happy endings, but we know better. That's not actually how things are. The reality is that the world is a horrible place, and we pride ourselves in our grown-up acceptance of that fact. We are tough; we can take it; we can, indeed, revel in the cruelty and violence and misery. But this is delusive. The ‘maturity’ shibboleth is an empty signifier. The child, as Wordsworth says, is father to the man: children have access to the world apparelled in celestial light, trailing clouds of glory—until, to continue the drift of his great ode, shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy (or girl) and at length we perceive it die away,/And fade into the light of common day. To celebrate this latter eventuality, to take a kind of perverse pride in it, is a crazy thing. It's like the story Vladimir Nabokov tells about the inspiration for his novel Lolita: a newspaper story he read ‘about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.’ Grimdark is that literature that draws the cage-bars: a strange kind of escapism.

It sometimes adopts the posture of satire, but that only deepens the conundrum. What, after all, is being satirised? Life in some general sense? This muddles the picture, since the world of the novel is by virtue of the estrangement of Fantasy as a mode, not life. Expressions of cynicism and worldliness impair rather than distil the thrust of the whole. ‘When one man knowingly kills another, they call it murder! When society causes the deaths of thousands, they shrug and call it a fact of life.’ [A Little Hatred, 202]. Abercrombie's novels are at their weakest when they rehearse such bromides. Luckily, the books also include a saving wit and comedy; and are sometimes self-reflexive of the mode that construes them. Here two characters admire a heroic statue.

“Stolicus was the inspiration, I understand, ordering the famous charge at the Battle of Darmium.”

Monza raised an eyebrow. “Leading a charge, eh? You'd have thought he'd have put some trousers on for work like that.”

“It's called artistic licence,” snapped Salier. “It's a fantasy, one can do as one pleases.”

Cosca frowned. “Really? I always felt a man makes more points worth making if he steers always close to the truth.” [Best Served Cold, 252]

This is funny, and to the point. But the truth mentioned at the end is jesting-Pilate nomenclature. Whose truth? The cynical adult, cathecting his (to gender it) sadism into a worldview that justifies his own bitterness? The Wordsworthian child, who can still apprehend the sublime glory in the world? Niall Harrison's account of this novel is good.

No matter how vivid and scrupulous, the worlds of fantasy fiction are not real worlds, and not representations of our past; they are always conceits, and I'd suggest that one possible measure of the success of a secondary-world fantasy—or at least, one measure of its potential for success at being more than mere analgesic—is the extent to which its author appears to remember this fact. Best Served Cold gives every impression that its author never forgets it; indeed, more than with any of the other writers I've just mentioned, there is a sense that Abercrombie is eagerly embracing the artificiality of his creation. Everything—the tonal see-sawing, the awareness of formula plotting, the mismatch of language, psychology and setting—can be read as supporting this, but there is more. Even when Abercrombie's description is not being self-aware—‘they could've had lamps,’ the narrator observes at one point, ‘but torches are that bit more sinister’ [p. 241]—it has a dutifully reductive feel, breaking each vista down into tidy lists of its component parts; or, less charitably, throwing detail at the wall in the hope that some of it sticks.

The novel, Harrison notes, is full of moments that remind you that this tale is constructed. He is right that ‘what grounds the book, in the main, is character: Abercrombie's crop of gentlemen-and-women bastards are satisfyingly hard to love’ and I forgive him his split-infinitive when he points out that ‘Best Served Cold is a novel that can be understood to deliberately deny the higher heroic possibilities of its imaginative premise, because it refuses to believe there are any. It believes the world is what it is; it believes in change, but no progress except the personal. It's a kind of artistic licence, but it's not in search of beauty, and I don't know how close it steers to the truth.’

Perhaps the truth I am missing the point. Escapism is a more complex phenomenon than it might seem. We paint the bars of our cage in order to frame, and so in a way to access, the golden lands outside. Adam Phillips ends his book on Houdini, that tricksy performer of the grand, impossible escape, with an account of Emily Dickinson.

When the poet Emily Dickinson died in 1886 at the age of fifty-five most of her neighbours hadn't seen her for well over twenty years. Withdrawing into her room in the family house in Amherst in the 1860s—‘friend, you thought/No life so sweet and fair as hiding brought’ a friend Emily Ford wrote in a commemorative poem—she was seen again only by her immediate family. [Phillips, Houdini's Box (2001), 147]

This was considered ‘rather strange’ then, as it would be now; but Phillips is interested in how many of the poem Dickinson wrote during those years of self-confinement are about, precisely, escape.

I never hear the word “Escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation—
A flying attitude!

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!

Phillips:

In the first verse there is an exhilaration and a readiness in the word escape; but it is notably when she hears it from somewhere else that her anticipation starts up. And now we, the readers, have heard it from her we too are expecting something. But once the poet is inspired by the world she is diminished by the consequences; the whole idea of escape merely reinforces her sense of helpless imprisonment (children, of course, unlike adults, are the people who can't choose to leave). The idea of escape, however enlivening as a prospect, merely convinces her of her limitations. There is, she seems to say, no freedom in the notion of escape; it merely reveals what the prison is really like.

It's an expressive paradox, and one that illuminates the whole sneerful ‘Tolkien is for kids; Grimdark is proper grown-up Fantasy’ angle. In a physical sense, as Phillips notes, children are the ones who cannot leave, as adults can; and yet children are the Wordsworthian ones who have not yet lost their true sight, as yet unobscured by the growing cage-bars, of meadow, grove, and stream, the earth, and every common sight apparelled in celestial light. They are freer than we adults. We are not obliged to love the bars of our prison-house. Phillips thinks, in Dickinson's case that ‘it is the idea of escape—the mere word itself—that releases us from something’: language, writing, Fantasy as such.