I read a post on social media that said: “Sometimes I feel like this year is being written by a four-year-old, a lot of people got sick so they bought a lot of toilet paper and stayed home.” This unfathomable idea, or what was supposed to be incomprehensible, of COVID-19, has set people out on a frenzy buying out the paper goods aisle of grocery stores and self-quarantining themselves. Countries have shut down, national emergencies have been called, universities and colleges are deserted, friends and families are kept at a distant, and the old and sick are targeted.
Similar to what we read in Steven Millhauser’s “Dangerous Laughter,” we have this element of the fantastic, mass terror. And though the idea of terror is very much realistic, the amplified emotion is what one might consider fantastic.
This idea we believed to be impossible, and therefore a facet of the fantastic, has now hit the little planet we call “earth.” After taking such massive hits as fires in Australia and the Amazon, the possibility for a third world war, and a group of terrorists have called themselves “ISIS,” we seem headed for an apocalypse.
We were asked if the fantastic designation can be elastic or mutable, and the answer happens to depend on the story. This current story, which we might dare to call “The Corona Virus,” is one with a malleable ending not yet written. The fantastic, I believe, can be more elastic rather than mutable with the ability to stretch to the farthest corners of the human mind and time. At this moment in time, this pandemic is nothing short of a young adult novel: the wide-spread panic, the social distancing, the thousands of deaths, and the heightened emotions that we have no timeline or scale for.
I agree that “The Corona Virus” reminds me of the dystopian novels I read as a teen. Even though I’m living through it, a part of me still can’t believe that it’s true. This idea was impossible to me, though reading your post I don’t see why I thought this. We’ve had wildfires, ISIS, and the possibility of WWIII, and yet the idea of a pandemic seemed fantastic to me. This whole situation tells you that there isn’t a straight line between fantastic and realism; one can easily cross into the other.
I was just talking to a friend about how crazy it was to me that the WWIII threat and the wildfires just happened a few months ago. With all the news about the coronavirus constantly coming in, it feels like everything else happened a lifetime ago. Since we’ve talked a lot about scale in relation to the fantastic, I think that in itself adds to how fantastic this all seems.
I also worry about the ending of this “story”; I definitely think that the uncertainty of it all is fueling most of the mass hysteria, and it’s terrifying to think that things might only get worse from here.