James Baldwin's "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon

Fantasy

The word "fantasy" has many positive connotations in its most frequent usages; achieving success beyond one's "wildest fantasies" is not generally seen as a negative thing, for instance. Yet the word also brings to mind a certain exoticism and quality of "otherness' that can have different effects in different contexts. Ultimately, of course the word is also directly tied to notions of untruth and falsehood, and it is in this last context that the quote from Baldwin's "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" most directly incorporates this word. The other meanings are perhaps more powerfully present in a symbolic manner, yet at this point in the narrative the narrator/protagonist is railing against the injustice of others' false notions about he and his family, and what goes on in their private lives. The subtext of his conversation is perhaps too powerful for the narrator to acknowledge outright, but the symbolism of the word finds its way to the reader regardless.

The exoticism implied by the word fantasy is heightened for American readers by the image of the lights of Paris, and especially the mention of the iconic Eiffel Tower. There is a fantasy at work in this image as it plays on the minds of the reader, and though this fantasy -- the image of an idealized Paris in the evening -- is a more positive one than that of the contemporary American attitude towards the narrator's race and family, it is nonetheless untrue, and grossly oversimplified in order to refrain from attempts at true understanding. No matter whom the narrator encounters, the same type of problem seems to surface; even the American students who idolize him have also simplified him in their minds, and have made him a symbol instead of seeing him as a living, complex human being.

The person-as-symbol element in fiction can be a very powerful one, and few uses of this device are more prominent or more powerful than Toni Morrison's in Beloved. This also comes with certain elements of fantasy -- misconceptions and/or misunderstandings based on a simplified view of the character Beloved. Sethe comes to treat Beloved as the sole purpose in her life, a being who deserves everything and is essentially above judgment due to the suffering caused her. This is just as incorrect a view of Beloved, it turns out, as the view of the narrator in Baldwin's short story by the Americans is. Whatever Beloved is, she is not simple, and not being granted the full life of responsibility ad freedom, she stagnates, and causes Sethe to stagnate along with her. The fantasies held in these works are not productive, but instead hold characters back from fulfilling their true potential. The commonality of the fantasies' relationship to race, either directly or through the indirect effects of the racial injustice of slavery -- is also highly significant.