The Fantastic in Fiction

For the dome, but you say, how to transform the entire country into a gigantic mall, whose sole purpose is to encourage feverish consumption.” (p. 118)

Millhauser’s short story, “The Dome,” has an extremely fantastic world in which these domes are invented that are able to cover, protect, and isolate a house. Then the story goes on to describe the rise of these domes, eventually spiraling into domes covering communities, cities, and then eventually the whole United States. The fact that they are able to cover such large portions of land in this world with such a large dome is impossible and definitely not realistic, but the author describes it as if it was bound to happen once the house domes began. It is fantastic how the citizens of this world are able to control the weather within the dome and how the fact of living under a dome automatically makes everything under it artificial, not natural and not realistic. A quote that expresses this perfectly is, “The hills, the streams, the woods, the fields, all have common elements in a new decor, an artfully designed landscape- designed by the mere fact of existing under the dome.” (p. 119) The narrator mentions how even murder itself isn’t taken seriously now that they seem to be in an artificial and fake world. Nearing the end of the story, the author explains how they are devising plans to create a dome cover for the entire world, which in our reality, is ridiculous, impossible and not something that could actually happen.

I think the way it relates to real life and our human experience, though, is how technology and inventions can seem successful but can get out of hand with how they are used, along with showing how the most amazing inventions can have their negative impacts on the world or on people. Many people think cars are an amazing invention, wouldn’t ever want to give them up and think they improve the world, but the negative impact of cars on society and on Earth is tremendous, from pollution to more deaths, and even isolation from the outside world. (Just like the domes isolate people from the outside world!) Another example from our reality that relates to this circumstance would be phones as they continue to advance, giving us more ways to isolate ourselves and be emotionally separate from other people. This story is trying to demonstrate how people go too far with technology and inventions to the point where they are unsafe, harmful, or bad in the long run whether it be to someone or to the world. Lots of technology nowadays separates us from others and that is exactly what the domes end up doing in the story. In the domes, it becomes a dangerous place and harmful as people do not take murder seriously, as well as takes away the truth and beauty of the natural world.

Millhauser has his narrator write about past; the history of domes are told to the audience as a historical account in this past tense, but then the narrator shifts to talk about present times and current feelings of the public, along with future predictions. The narrator talks as a collective person, mentioning “we” in the sentence: “Meanwhile we walk beneath the Celestilux sky, dreaming of new heavens, of impossible architectures.” (p. 121)

 

Indeed, one might argue that under the regime of the Dome, the country has become not a mall but an immense hall of entertainment, in which every citizen is a player. Certain unpleasant facts of life—rundown neighborhoods, traffic accidents, robberies, drive-by shootings—are in this view taken less seriously, since they are felt to be part of the artificial displays under the Dome. Death itself is losing its terror, has come to seem little more than a brilliantly contrived effect.

“The Dome” by Steven Millhauser is fantastic in that the dome is an allegory to technology, capitalism, and how humans get carried away with new inventions and the conflict that new technology brings. The story is told from a third-person objective point of view. Instead of relying on dialogue, Millhauser describes the dome as if it is in a history textbook or a column in the newspaper. This makes the story seem more authentic and plausible. In the beginning, the conflict because apparent when the manufacturer tries to fix consumer’s small problems with the dome, but as time progresses and more people who own the dome have problems that become too much for the manufacturer to fix. This conflict is exaggerated but is portrayed in a unique way because the realism within the story shines through the fantasy. The allegory that the dome exemplifies is how the human race possesses something new, but it quickly becomes problematic or unsatisfactory to us, and before we realize it, it takes away the reality that we once had within our lives. The ways in which Millhauser displays the dome makes me wonder whether he was influenced by the rise of cell phones, computers and how it would change our lives to be unauthentic and unsatisfactory.

Read this article and then compose a short short story that makes use of the fantastic. Your story should be entitled “The Pard.” You will then read it to the class.

[T]hat single word, “love,” was trying to compress within itself a multitude of meanings, was trying to take many precise and separate feelings and crush them into a single mushy mass, which I was being asked to hold in m
y hands like a big sticky ball.

We’ve talked a lot about the choices a writer makes in this class, especially about point of view.  In “History of Disturbance,” Millhauser uses second person, which up until this point, we haven’t seen a lot of in this class.  The interesting thing about how
this story is told, is that at the beginning, the narrator is addressing Elane and using what seems like straightforward second person.  This begins to shift however, as we see that it’s really being told from more of a first person perspective addressed to a specific audience who is constantly being referenced.
The narration becomes much more of a self reflection as the story develops. One of the things I found ironic about this story was that despite becoming disenchanted and uneasy with the use of words, even refusing to write things down, he is still choosing to tell this story.

Millhauser also employs the tactic of starting the story at the end (in present tense) and reflecting back on what has lead up to this point.  If he had started the story at the lake, instead of at the end of the story the tone would’ve been less clear.  We wonder why Elaine is so patiently furious, what this narrator has done to her to make her so upset.  These choices Millhauser makes, set us up to maintain our interest throughout the story, they keep us reading, wanting to find out what happens next.

You turned slowly to me. I remember the lazy roll of your head, your cheek against the vinyl strips, your hair flattened on one side, your eyelids sleepy. You said, “Do you love me?” Your voice was flirtatious, easy—you weren’t asking me to put a doubt to rest. I smiled, opened my mouth to answer, and for some reason recalled the afternoon at Sandy Point. And again I felt that burst of irritation, as if words were interposing themselves between me and the summer night. I said nothing. The silence began to swell. I could feel it pressing against both of us, like some big rubbery thing. I saw your eyes, still sleepy, begin to grow alert with confusion. And as if I were waking from a trance, I pushed away the silence, I beat it down with a yes yes yes, of course of course. You put your hand on my arm. All was well.

Steven Millhauser’s story uses sensory detail in order to explain the world that the narrator wants to live in with his wife. The story includes very little dialogue because the narrator is focused on the sounds and sites around him, and the emotions these things invoke in him. Because the story is a written first person, there is a lack of understanding of the world that the readers are familiar with more dialogue, but this allows for us as the reader to be captured into the world that the husband sees and understand what that world would be like. The readers are engulfed into the husband’s head in order to sympathize with him and understand where he is coming from with wanting a place with little to no words. In one way, the husband is similar to a lot of men because he doesn’t understand why his wife asks questions like, “Do you love me?”. He dissects what seems like a simple question, but his own interpretation of the question causes the reader to understand the problems that words cause. The details of the sounds and places are more in-depth and it is appreciated more because of the lack of dialogue. Through this sensory lens, we are more appreciative of things that often get ignored because of what a person is saying or why they are saying. This story is very interesting because Millhauser is a writer so words are important to him and they are important in the story because they are what makes the scenes come alive, but the story shows the importance of silence and the amazing world you see in silence.

I’ve seen krill accelerate toward the maw of Team Whale, streaming bubbles, a mute shrimp battle cry.” (p.140)

In Russell’s short story, “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating,” the narrator goes into detail about these Food Chain Games in the Antarctic between whales and krill. This story is very fantastical because it takes this wild, crazy idea that made into a sports-game-esque guide in how to be prepared for and how to have a great tailgate at this much-anticipated game. Right off of the bat, the fact that one must completely say goodbye to their family, leave their job, and prepare for their own death is quite extra for a game, but in this world, that is a normal measure in preparation for the games, doing this every time before another game. It is also fantastical that the narrator travels to the Antarctic so early for the games, saying, “Honestly, for the March game I like to get down to the Ross Ice Shelf by mid-January.” (p.136) The elements around the character in this world are fantastical, too, mentioning that the “water will taste a little like movie popcorn unless you doctor it with Tang or Crystal Light lemonade. (p.138) The krill below are personified very much as the narrator and others cheer them on from above. He says, “Do they understand what they are seeing with their shrimpy compound eyes? Yes. Definitely.” (p.140)  Another silly fantastic part of the piece is that Team Whale’s costume costs so much, like when he says that “Just the fin portion costs three thousand dollars.” (p.141) The narrator eats whale meat off of hot coals
with his teeth, which is obviously far from our normal reality, but the character’s specialty. The fact that there is traffic in the straits is an amusing fantastical detail, imagining this world where many boats are trying to get to this game in the freezing Arctic with their boats. The skua eating the kid after Team Whale had killed him is pretty gross, but fantastical as well since birds do not eat human meat. Another fantastical thing is the fact you can “lose at tailgating” because tailgating in our normal world is something that is supposed to be enjoyable, no rules, and not at all competitive, but in this world, tailgating at this specific game has many requirements to survive and is very competitive. And, lastly, the quote “Krill will surge along either side of your boat in a rosy pregame warm-up. Lots of excitement in the frozen air.” (p.144) expresses the fantastic images of krill being able to do warm-ups for their games and the krill knowing what is going on, along with such excitement in such a cold environment.

This story is written in a first-person narrative, in which our narrator tells the readers step by step advice about how to go to these games properly. This first narrative creates a sense of personal closeness to the narrator and it is used in a very charming, humorous way as the narrator discusses his own experiences traveling and going to the games. It is a very convincing voice as he expresses his personality through the way he talks about the different aspects of the game and what leads up to it. The voice adds an amazing dimension to the story that makes it work and compelling to the reader.

Characters that Inhabit Fantastical Elements 

There are a couple of confusing elements in this story.  First, the characters have the same names.  Secondly, the characters have the same personality traits as the person they are named after. Though this is confusing it brings forth an interesting idea that there is no individual identity and that we as people are just like our ancestors from the previous generation. Garcia Marquez is playing with the idea that history will repeat itself, not only in society as a whole, but also in families. We as the readers understand this idea because the characters continue to repeat the very same actions and make the very same mistakes that their family members have previously done in the past .

Melquiades haunts the family because “he could not bear the solitude of death,” which is a powerful statement about the loneliness that encompasses death.

Father Nicanor talks about the “undeniable proof of the infinite power of God” because of the experiences of “levitation by means of chocolate.” Since Father Nicanor believes that God’s presence is undeniable due to chocolate levitation, this appears to be a child-like thought.  Religious leaders, particularly Christian missionaries have said  similar things to gain followers in colonized countries.

Ursula Iguaran realizes her inability to see “the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing,”  after she loses her eyesight. This idea is similar to the idea that people are often so busy with their lives so much so, that they neglect to appreciate the small things until they no longer have those small things. By using her loss of vision as a way to realize what she neglected to appreciate, the readers are able to better comprehend the gravity of loss, not just through death, but in disability and the various ways loss occurs throughout life.

Magical Realism 

The story is also framed with magical realism, which is the idea of using real visible elements in the world and integrating it with fantasy elements. This idea allows people who are in isolated places to better understand various realities. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does this in One Hundred Years of Solitude by telling the history of Macondo through the eyes of the people who founded the city as well as the people who lived within the colonized city. By using magical realism Gabriel Garcia Marquez is no longer restrained by the typical literary functions of a novel like linear time structure. By using the magical elements in the story, Garcia Marquez is able to talk about the events played out in such a matter, that it makes it almost believable to the reader, which is what makes this novel so fantastic and intriguing.

One of my favorite parts of the story was when the people of Macondo were suffering from insomnia. This part of the story is an example of how Garcia Marquez uses a real-world problem.  However,  instead of focusing on what we normally focus on when thinking of insomnia, Garcia Marquez focuses on “its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory.” This is something that we as humans don’t think about when suffering from insomnia.  Garcia Marquez talks about the people in Macondo who are suffering from lack of memories.  He takes this real-world problem and dramatizes it into the fantastic that we often neglect to think about.

Time

Time is considered one of the key ways that Garcia Marquez plays with the idea of history and a person’s perception of history in the first sentence of the book. History is usually written by the people who have the privilege of telling it. In this story, Garcia Marquez distinguishes that those who tell the story may get it wrong. For example, when Jose Arcadio Buendia talks about ice being “the great invention of our time”, this of course is not true simply because ice was not invented by humans or any living thing. However, Jose Arcadio Buendia perceives it to be an invention. Basically, he is saying that the way in which we perceive what we see and what we remember can be fantasy, but can appear to be real to an individual.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”  This sentence alone is fantastic because it shows the past, present, and future in one single sentence; breaking the laws of linear narratives in literature. He does this many times throughout the book by starting off many sentences with, “Many years later” or “years later.”

Melquiades writes a story in Sanskrit on parchment paper that is not written “in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant.” Not only does this particular part of the story defy “man’s conventional time,” but it is also the way in which One Hundred Years of Solitude is told throughout the story which is realistic in the way that we remember memories. This part of the story as well as the rest of the book relates back to how we often remember events from our past.

History 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez also goes further normalizing violence which often happens in colonized countries. He does this in his description of the electrified fence that is around the banana’s company’s compound and the assassins that shoot at 3,000 people. This idea is possibly influenced by the Banana Massacre which occurred in Garcia Marquez’s town when he was only six years old. Colonel Aureliano was a young boy when the magical events in the story took place. Therefore, the book is about how Colonel Aureliano coped with his family history and his understanding of the history of Macondo. This leads to an understanding of how Garcia Marquez took the history that he experienced during the Banana Massacre and how he used that to tell the story of a fictional made up town that goes through similar things.  However, the history, memories, and nostalgia of it all are not remembered in the linear format that stories often portray. This allows the story to be more realistic and brings forth the fantastic elements to make us as readers believe in the town of Macondo and the events that took place before its downfall.

s downfall. 

“‘I learned from falling in love with that Koenig & Bauer. Infatuation is worth nothing. It has nothing to do with the real world.’ She nodded at the steam engine looming in the corner by her bed. ‘Me and Hercules, we have an understanding. We take care of each other. It’s a better kind of love, I think.'”

Karin Tidbeck’s “Beatrice” was not what I was expecting the story to be. The story is very creepy in its own unique way. The idea of a man and a woman falling in love with transportation machines is both baffling and intriguing. When Anna talks about infatuation and love, it seems like both Anna and Franz misunderstood their relationship with the engine and aircraft. They think that having an intimate relationship with an aircraft and engine is the same as having an intimate relationship.

I think that Anna and Franz were infatuated with their lovers (the engine and the aircraft). However, their consent to being in a relationship. This tends to make the reader think that the engine and aircraft could be representation of slaves. This story is about how strong infatuation can be to an individual and how the strength of infatuation can lead a person to do various actions such as holding them captive. This story was very creeping, intriguing, and mysterious in all of its elements of personifying an inanimate object to the point that someone is infatuated with it.

Although the laugh parlors existed in fact, for we all attended them and even began to form clubs of our own, they also continued to lead a separate and in a sense higher existence in the realm of rumor, which had the effect of lifting them into the inaccessible and mythical.” p. 78

In this Millhauser piece, “Dangerous Laughter,” the author creates a fantastical community in which they view laughter as a dark, magical release. This short story is fantastical because, in our reality, laughing is a normal, unnoted thing, and not known as a sensual secret. We truly get a sense of how different this world is by the descriptions of these “ambiguous realms” of theirs in these laughter clubs and parlors. There is a sense of guilt and darkness of releasing one so, the groups giving in to “dark depths of laughter.” When Clara Schuler joins everyone, beginning as a neat, quiet girl, becomes a powerful laugher in these secret societies, showing that she surpasses limits that others haven’t ventured into. It was interesting how crying and weeping is brought in the clubs, proving to be a very tiring, but thrilling release. Of course, in real life, crying isn’t (from my knowledge!) a satisfying release, but more of a sad thing, only feeling relieved after, but surely not good feelings while crying. When Clara brings back their original laughter, going on for a very long time, the narrator says that she had “abandoned herself to her desire” to laugh as the narrator watched her lose herself to the laughter.

This piece is in a first-person narrative, describing them as a collective, but also describing his individual experience with the strange occurrence of this summer and what they all would do. The narrator is looking back on this summer, describing in intricate detail what they went through and how it the experience was. The personal, very specific details the narrator includes about the summer is amazing in creating this world for the readers, and also, the sensory details are very helpful as well in letting the audience experience this strange phenomenon.

It was hard to pick a good quote from this story because there were so many that could be discussed.

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word.

This story is set up to make us question what we are being told. Not only through the narrator telling us to not believe what we are being told, but also how the story jumps around so often. The story may get confusing at points, but it still draws us in because it makes us want to know how all of these different people and points will connect back to the Handbag. The different characters that we see throughout make us want to believe the tale, but then Link places an aspect of their personal story in that turns the tale back to unbelievable. Link’s choices to give constant reminders that this is an unbelievable tale puts an interesting twist on fictional stories. We are taught to make our readers believe what we are saying. Link takes that bit of education and throws it out a window. In my opinion its one of the aspects of this story that makes it so interesting.

Zofia has never seen such a place. There were trains and electric lights and movie theaters, and there were people shooting each other. Bombs were falling. A war going on. Most of the villagers decided to climb right back inside the handbag, but Zofia volunteered to stay in the world and look after the handbag. She had fallen in love with movies and silk stockings and with a young man, a Russian deserter.”

In this story “Faery Handbag,” Zofia is this magical figure throughout. The narrator describes her grandmother, Zofia, along with many of the stories she was told by her, all very fantastical about unknown worlds within her beloved handbag. The beginning we discover the grandmother had died, and it goes full circle at the end when she dies after wanting to go back into the handbag to search for Jake. The grandmother dying results in not only the loss of her imaginative, quirky and crazy grandmother, but also the loss of the handbag and the loss of Jake, too. Repeated through the story, the narrator is told she shouldn’t believe all the stories Zofia tells her and at the end, the readers are told we shouldn’t believe what the narrator has told us. These unreliable, fantastical stories of Zofia and the narrator leaves the readers wondering as we are kept in the dark about the truth.

We are told this story through a first person narrative, letting us enter the story through the narrator and experience what she is experiencing. It is a great choice of the author because it allows the readers to completely trust the narrator’s story and tales, meanwhile, it is not actually reliable at all, which the narrator herself lets us know at the end. We learn a lot from the narrator by being in her eyes as well because we see what she does and the audience tries to trust Zofia like she does. Not only is this a story about unreliable tales from others, but it is also a story about relentless hope as the narrator continues to search for the beloved, magical handbag, despite how crazy it may be. It is also a story about taking chances into the unknown, as Zofia does when she explores and stays in the real world.