The thing that gets me the most about critics of Terry Pratchett’s novels who say they’re not important or “literature” because they’re “not realistic” is this:
By what yardstick are we supposed to be measuring “realism”?
See, I’m willing to bet that the yardstick these critics use is that oh so popular model of “the real world is really a terrible place, so the world of this piece of media is full of barbarism and grotesque cruelty.”* And Terry Pratchett never, ever fell into that dismal trope. He didn’t hunt his characters for sport. There’s no gratuitous sexual violence (no sexual violence at all, that I can think of). Even if a death or an act of evil is senseless from an in-world point of view, it isn’t random and senseless from a narrative perspective, thrown in to shock or to remind readers/viewers that “that’s reality.” The Discworld isn’t a happy rainbow place all the time. But it’s not a bleak pit of despair, either. There are bad people of all stripes, from literal torturers and megalomaniacs to regular folk who perpetuate the kind of small mundane badness pretty much every human is guilty of at one time or another. But there are good people too. And sometimes some of them die along the way, but ultimately the good people win and the world is changed for the better or at least doesn’t get any worse. Is that really “unrealistic”?
Terry Pratchett didn’t write a bunch of books about people being brutal to each other because “that’s human nature.” Terry Pratchett acknowledged–often, even–that humanity is prone to base acts. But what his books are really about, is humanity’s ability to rise above that. Terry Pratchett wrote about protagonists who are imperfect, doing good in the world often against their first instincts. He wrote about situations where it is hard to be good, but where his protagonists choose it anyway.
Rincewind is a coward who craves only boredom, but he steps up to the plate and saves the world whenever it turns out no one else can.
Sam Vimes is a bitter, cynical recovering alcoholic who is desperate to be a better man and to do what’s just for everyone.
Granny Weatherwax is an aloof, blunt loner who finds “being the good one” a burden, but she works tirelessly to protect and serve her steading, just so everyone else can be free to go about their normal little everyday lives.
Brutha starts off blindly believing that “purifying” sinners is necessary, but he learns to think for himself and when later on he has the chance to kill the worst of the Quisition’s torturers? He carries him through a desert, instead, and ends up reforming a religion.
These are just a few of so many examples. And are they “unrealistic”? Is the idea that imperfect beings can choose to do good even if it is difficult “fantasy”? Is it really too hard to believe that maybe even if the nature of humanity inclines toward selfishness and greed and all that terrible stuff, humanity can also do better than that, if individuals choose to?
Because, wow, to me that’s an awfully uninspiring view of “reality”. It’s kind of a boring one, too, when it comes to media. If all you’re going to show me is a series of escalating cruelty for shock value, because “in the real world good people suffer” or whatever edgy thing you think is “realistic”, I’m not interested, sorry.
Give me Terry Pratchett’s world, where readers can think that if a screwup like Rincewind or someone as bad-tempered as Granny can do good maybe they, the readers, can do good too. That if Vimes can turn his life around and work for justice, and if Brutha can question authority and stand up to oppression, maybe they could help change things, too. Give me that “fantasy” any day.
That’s the kind of “literature” I want.
*Either that or they just see books where magic is real and immediately put on their “I’m a grown up, grown ups don’t believe in magic” hats and roll their eyes, sure in the knowledge of their superiority, because what value could there ever be in having a little imagination, right?
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