My story for this week was “Femaville 29,” and I have to admit that I was a little disappointed with it. I mean, it was a great story, and I really enjoyed reading it, but I felt that it lacked a little in the fantasy department. You really don’t even notice anything fantastical until the very end. I mean, children playing make believe is fantasy in itself, but is a story almost entirely about children playing make believe really considered fantasy? I get the fantasy element at the end where all of the evacuees can see the new city that the children built and they all go live there, but the way it was written lead me to think that Parrish just went a little “nutso” after he killed the little boy, which makes me think that he’s just hallucinating the whole thing. The reason it really makes me wonder is because every time he sees Djamala, he also sees the building in which he shot the little boy. This makes me wonder…
Would we consider hallucinations fantasy?
I think of fantasy as an intentional “creation” of something, whether it’s just mentally imagining it or physically writing it (or whatever you do to “make” it, ha-ha), but I think of a hallucination as something very unintentional and unwanted. It’s defined on dictionary.com as a false or mistaken idea which makes me think that maybe it’s not really fantasy. Here is where I get fuzzy – we said in class that playing make believe is considered fantasy. So, if someone had an imaginary friend, I would consider it fantasy and still make believe. BUT, what if that imaginary friend suddenly became a hallucination and the person thought it was real? Would it still be fantasy?
This leads me on a new thought, I also think of fantasy as being imaginary. Most people who read fantasy know deep down that it’s not real at least outside of our minds, ha-ha. I’m pretty sure that those who have hallucinations think they are real. Would this dismiss them from being considered fantasy?
I went on a long tangent, but I’m a little “under the weather,” and my cold medicine makes me a little loopy. I’m hoping that all of this will make sense in the morning when I’m no longer loopy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Wow, that was pretty long, maybe I should write my paper on whether hallucinations should be considered fantasy, lol. It would already be longer than what I've written so far :/
I think I followed part of that. Very interesting questions. I think you have to be on cold medicine to go where you went Courtney :)
Courtney's basic question -- whether a fantasy is still a fantasy if you believe in its reality -- is the one I asked at the beginning of the semester. If I believe in witches, then is a story about witches (such as Link's "Catskin") a fantasy as far as I am concerned? How about a story about the Devil, or God, or gods, or angels, or fairies, or ghosts? Countless people believe in one or more of those ... can we think of any fantasy trope, in fact, so fantastical that no one believes in it?
I'll leave the fantasy question to the experts, but I wanted to note that I didn't get the hallucination feel from Parrish. The kids' construction was just too coordinated. Not to mention, it seems the FEMA agent would have reacted differently if he had just had some grand hallucinatory episode that prevented him from getting on the bus like everyone else. Instead, she definitely seems to be covering for a strange mass-disappearance. She was pretty blunt, so I think she'd just tell him straight out if he'd gone temporarily crazy. Or maybe I just want the magical happy land to be real too.
Post a Comment