The Kantian Concerns in Escapism

One thing that the burgeoning novelist Lee Doty shares with more accomplished authors and conceptual artists like JJ Abrams, and the canonical, like Cervantes, or Thomas Mann, is the fantastical troping of escape from reality. Doty just handles this badly, which is what I do not like about his foray into this much abused genre. His main superhero, Dek, is a boy with Downs syndrome who is plucked, ambiguously, out of a car accident, and is made into a replicant by his wizard father. The same happens to Roy, who is speculatively retarded. Doty never spells this out; instead these boys get superpowers and are conveniently killed in the opening narrative. We can also note, in the fabled discussion thread which followed my negative review, Doty ceased any comment directed at me as soon as I admitted to a disability. I did not expect that he would answer my email, as by that point I was thoroughly antagonized, but it is interesting, none the less.

We utilize chronic conditions creatively in a variety of ways, Abrams with somewhat more ingenuity toward a mythology. There was Locke's real world paralysis, or Rose's terminal illness, all suspended on a magical island transposed from Stevenson into a post 9/11 world. Henry James dollops consumption and other mysterious ailments into fairy tales. The young Mann, who I can only tolerate in small doses, and have placed his corroded novellas that signal the death of the Romantic movement into archive, for the time being, does the same thing, turning the very aspects of deterioration into a melodramatic looking glass. I preface my diffidence toward Mann's homo-erotic tortures with the caution that I have not read his more mature Modernist works, but still feel that James' genius is more synchronic toward my distaste for leveling the playing field over the pursuit of sexual pleasure, which can also be blinding, and in some ways, a selfish escape, however liberating the intense orgasm might be. Henry James knew, as I have learned, to my misfortune, that intimacy, even the purely emotional, can have deadly consequences.

Doty leans heavily on Philip K Dick for his cultural references in Out of the Black, but Dick, in his post nuclear android settings, does not let us escape from the challenge of whether we create worlds of our own destruction, or can hold to optimism for the future, which is another way of conveying that you should not dismiss what bitter would be elitists like myself have to say. Does this mean I am hostile to imagination? Not at all. I just want you to think twice, and whatever you shy from in my behavior, what does Doty's shunning of me entail, especially when he is willing to exploit the disadvantaged on the cheap. Food for thought.