mixing worlds

Mixing Realism and Fantasy…

I’ve been contemplating Naomi Wallace’s style in her plays that we are reading and wondering why I enjoy her style so much. I’ve always enjoyed reading fantasy. But I’ve grown to love in the last few years the mixing of fantasy and realism. Perhaps because there are things that happen in our own lives that are difficult to articulate in straight facts but are still truths about our lives. One of my favorite films is the French film Amelie. In the story there is this mixing of realism and fantasy – the realistic struggles of a shy woman intertwined with her own internal struggles spilling out into the everyday. Another favorite of mine is Pan’s Labyrinth – where a young girl’s struggles and fears during war are manifested in fantastical creatures. As an audience member you begin to question what is “real” and what is imagined in this film.

But life is like that – or at least it is for me. That we live in the material world that is around us but we still live in the things that make up the way we envision the world. We live with the presence of those who have died and impacted our lives; we imagine and create things into being in our lives. The non-material parts of our lives impact us deeply just as the material aspects do.

So I wonder if the worlds that Naomi Wallace creates that are mixing these two worlds that we so often seek to separate are more intertwined in our lives than we’d like to admit. Or perhaps I just see the world more through the poetical than statistical and so it makes sense some how for me.