Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

The three stories this week were similar but also very different. All three were tales of people who are experiencing changes that seem/are impossible. “Fatso” features a young woman who suddenly turns into a fat, hairy man at night, “Mantis” a young girl who has inherited the insect-like genes of her grandmother, and “Beast” a woman who turns into a deer at night.

The stories that I enjoyed the most would have to be “Mantis” and “Fatso.” “Mantis” was very interesting to me because the little girl was losing her skin, her teeth, her hair, etc. I found it very hard to determine why this was happening to her and what exactly was happening to her at times. There was some judgement by others at times, but overall it seemed that she was very accepted by the girls at her school. She was treated normally by them, and it seemed like they all had healthy relationships with on another. Something that also stood out to me with this story was the mother’s attitude towards what the young girl was dealing with. I got the impression that her mother did not see this as a disability, nor did she see her daughter any differently. They had a routine that they followed and certain things they had to do, but other than that, she allowed her daughter to live a normal life. One of the negative experiences that the young girl had was with a boy at the party she went to. My interpretation of their interaction was that the boy (Mark Kemper) was not interested in the girl as a person; he was interested in her appearance. He saw her as something interesting to look at, but not for the right reasons. I am not sure if this was her first experience with people who view her this way, but it led to a chain of events that resulted in her skin unraveling,  or becoming undone. This story was very interesting to me because it followed her journey throughout this phase in her life where things can be confusing. I would like to think that at the end she shed her metaphorical skin and became this new person who went through puberty, but there could be multiple meanings to the ending, which I liked as well.

When it comes to “Fatso” I found this story very surprising because it was something that was so unexpected. My interpretation of this story was having the best of both worlds. I expected the boyfriend to be shocked that the woman he loved and eventually would wind up spending the rest of his life with would be dealing with this problem. It seems as though the boyfriend did find it a bit strange at first, but then started to look forward to their outings. It is like he found a lover and also a best friend. Something that I annotated is that this could secretly be every guy’s dream which is being able to be in a relationship and have amazing sex (which is highlighted) but not having to give up the bachelor lifestyle.

The last story that we read was “Beast.” This story was the most difficult for me to connect with, but I feel like it still had a deep meaning. The interpretation that I took from this story is that everyone has their secrets. The main character was cheating on her husband, which is what started her transformation. Even though she loved him very much, she still had thoughts about the other man. The end of the story really shocked me. Her husband also turned into a deer and it seemed that he was having these experiences way before she was. He seemed to know exactly what to do. She discovers that there are hundreds of deer walking in a her like fashion. Even though she is not sure what they are doing or where they are going, she ends up joining the herd. I believe that this could represent the other people in her community, everyone has their secrets that they keep.

I have read many stories about transformation, but none hooked me so much as Julia Armfield’s short story “Mantis” from her collection Salt Slow. What struck me was the language of this story — how it weaves through mystery and foreshadowing, using as its setting both a home in which secrets are kept and a Catholic school where our narrator is just a normal fifteen-year-old girl; it’s all captivating. The mystery of the absent grandfather and father leaves open the question “Did they leave or die?” until the story’s final line, which implies their fate. “Not for kissing but for something more in keeping with my genes” reveals the narrator’s desire to eat the young, infatuated Mark Kemper while resolving the mystery of the missing men: they, too, have been eaten after having mated with the women of the narrator’s family. These missing men are woven through as a plot-line that we think is minor but reveals so much about both the mother and grandmother at the end —  and about their characters.

Language can, of course, be complicated or simple, and the language of “Mantis” makes for a much easier read than Thoreau – the style is a slice-of-life, yet becomes more slice-of-life mixed with science fiction as we go — and it makes reading the story fun. One enjoys reading, then rereading over and over, as this fifteen-year-old girl attends Catholic school and then begins to turn into a praying mantis, a genetic inheritance from the women in her family. As a result, the story takes you down hook, line, and sinker every time. Julia Armfield’s style makes it that fun read, how she writes the transformational puberty no different from girls gossiping and teasing each other, how the casualness of the weirdness that is this girl becoming a literal praying mantis in a bathroom at a party seems absolutely normal yet we know it’s not, and how it is written like this is a typical Sunday night for our young Catholic-school attending girl, conveys the emotion that this is expected and this is normal.

Not to go too far into the book review-style blog post, the question is why – why does Julia Armfield use that language? Language always has a reason behind it – whether to foreshadow, convey emotion, or even simply convey that something is happening. So why does Julia Armfield take this no-doubt fantasy and sci-fi transformation and set it in a Catholic (supposedly, based on ages) middle and high school, and why does it happen to this young girl? Simply put – young girls transform at that age.

In “Mantis,” it is no secret the other girls are undergoing transformations — of character, personality, looks, health. Girls start their periods, focus on boys, and start to make themselves look appealing to the aforementioned boys, all while our narrator just oh-so-casually becomes a praying mantis. I couldn’t help but find similarities — the girls are desperate for boys to want them for romance, and the praying mantis wants the male of their species too — although for maybe a different reason. The praying mantis puberty is written as equal to the other girl’s puberties — and I wondered on the first read, confirmed on the second and third – if this was intentional. It was, these girls are undergoing changes to everything they might know – going from sweet little girls to young teenagers – and the way they talk about the boys as if they are prizes to be hunted and won, is similar to the mantis – they mate with them, then eat them. The whole story is one of transformation – we just focus on the fantastic one, but the language makes it clear – especially on those second and third reads – that everyone in this story underwent a transformation at some point, save Mark Kemper, the poor thing, and it changes their characters. Girls that once joked about losing weight now joke about how they will sleep with a boy! and they no longer joke about starving – they actually do. The metamorphosis of our lovely narrator into a praying mantis represents, in my mind, this timeless coming of age – when girls’ thoughts turn from ew Josh? to Oh, Josh!, from avoiding boys (boys drool, girls rule!) to hunting them (Did you see Luke yesterday? He looked sooo cute) and wondering which boy will ask them out, who goes to prom with whom – the praying mantis in this story is written just as casually as the rest, because of that metaphor, of the transformation young girls go through when we experience puberty — because Julia Armfield understands the simple facts, that we all experience that change of avoidance to attraction, and she portrays it in a fantastical way. After all, what better way to illustrate that than the praying mantis itself?

In Juila Armfield’s “Mantis,” the mother of the girl keeps trying to make her pretty and beautiful. An Avon sales lady sells cosmetics to them to make them beautiful, and even the girls at the Catholic school are worried about their appearance. To me this story is about how as children we do not care much about our appearance, but as we get older the pressure of how we look gets stronger from our family members. We are born with our genes that we get from our family, but we want to look better than other females to get the attention of our loved ones.

In the story, the girl sheds her skin, hair, and teeth, representing how young girls’ bodies change as they move through adolescence into adulthood. We change, and we judge our bodies because these changes are unfamiliar and everything is growing. We face more issues than we’d faced as children. We experience anger, lust, appearance, sadness, self-esteem, and the desire for popularity, self-awareness, and self-esteem.

I read “Beasts” by Samantha Hunt. A woman has ticks on her body and her husband takes the ticks off of her. At night the woman turns into a deer after she makes out with another man in a nightclub. To me it is about secret’s that we keep from others. Her husband has secrets, and it wasn’t until years after they were married that she found out that he was nice guy, wonder and a great singing voice. She cheated on her husband and is keeping that a secret from him.

Even after years of marriage she felt lust from another man, and she liked it. When we crave sex, we let our animals out and we are no longer humans. We have to keep our sex life secret during the day and at night is when we let our animals out to play. Sometimes we are afraid to show our true selves to even the person we are close to because we do not want them to leave.

I read “Fatso“ by Etgar Keret. Two people had been dating for a while and the guy does not believe that the secret that the woman is hiding is a big deal. He goes through different scenario in his head about her secret and he there to comfort her. When she does turns into a fat man at night in his arms, he is shocked. The guy loves the woman no matter what and they stay together for a long time.

When you love someone, you love them no matter who or what they look like, and this story is about that. We use our imagination when someone says they need to tell us something and, in our heads, it is not a big deal, and we are okay with everything. When we finally tell or show who we are to our significate other we want them to stay and accept us but sometimes they leave us. When they do accept us, we can be ourselves with them and they are okay with that because they love us and know we are not perfect.

The three works “Fatso” by Etgar Keret, “Beast” by Samantha Hunt, and “Mantis” by Julia Armfield all provide parallel motifs that reward examination of the ideas of transformation, secrecy, and intimacy.

In all three stories, a woman is both the protagonist and antagonist; there is internal conflict within each of them that creates the story. The internal conflict in each of these three stories is one that extends to the physical and fantastical; one protagonist is antagonized by her pubescent transformation into a praying mantis, another by her nightly shifting into a grotesque man from delicate, feminine form, and the last by a newfound nightly transformation into a deer, a beast.

The benefit of reading these stories together is that the transformations occur at differing points in the characters’ lives. For “Mantis,” this transformation occurs in adolescence, and the relationship it directly affects is a surface-level dynamic you would expect between a boy and girl who attend Catholic school. In “Fatso” the transformation most directly affects a couple newly embracing their love for each other, but not without hesitation. Lastly, in “Beast” the relationship affected is the deepest out of all of these stories — a married couple who retain glimmering bouts of tenderness and infatuation for each other, even after eleven years.

The protagonists in the stories are all at different stages of life and exhibit different levels of intimacy with themselves and with their partners and the other people around them. Despite this, they all share a common secret: a secretive transformative experience that affects them nearly every day or night since the spawning of their transformation. Extrapolating on the themes of secrecy and intimacy, I’d suggest that all three stories contain transformation after respective ‘peak intimacy’ has been explored — a potential first kiss, a sexual and romantic relationship, a marriage. These three examples go to show that despite partaking in what may be considered the most intimate act, greater intimacy lie behind the secrets we maintain in the dark and keep away from the daylight.

When the intimacy behind these secretive transformation is shared, there is subsequent transformation for the other characters. For the young, Catholic boy in “Mantis,” unfortunately this transformation is less than ideal, but it is a transformation nonetheless. In “Fatso,” the boyfriend goes through a transformation that relinquishes his doubts about his relationship and his nonchalant approach to love. In “Beast” it is revealed that the husband shares the same secret as his wife. For this story, it may act as insight into infidelity — the woman turned into a deer after a bout of infidelity, leading to the notion that maybe the husband has too –and it is unknown when such a transformation occurred, but both individuals end at peace, embracing their animalistic nature.

The process of a person transforming into something new is a tool that is always seen throughout literature. It is common to read about characters that transform into different people or animals or mythical creatures. However, I had never read anything like “Mantis” by Julia Armfield, “Beast” by Samantha Hunt, and “Fatso” by Etgar Keret. All three stories share the transformation, but have differences that allow for the stories to be totally different from one another.

 The first story I read was Julia Armfield’s “Mantis.” I read it a couple of times, and as I reread the story, I realized that the foreshadowing of the transformation had flown over my head in my initial reading. I’d missed little details such as the hereditary nature of her skin condition, the implication that her grandmother was an animal, and the absence of male figures in the family. These details led me to the idea that she was transforming into something different. My interpretation of her transformation is that it seems to be her ultimate form. For a praying mantis, the last shedding is the most important since it is the one that they are stuck with for the rest of their lives. Hence, it seems to me that similar to a praying mantis, the ‘shed’ that she is going through leads her to the “skin” that she will be wearing for her adolescence, which seems to become something that she seems to enjoy. She seems to see some of her mother in her new transformation, which seems to be something that she had been desiring for some time as she looked into old pictures of her mother and grandmother. Additionally, this shed also could symbolize the traits and habits which were passed down from her family, which I feel like is what the story was trying to portray — that as a person grows, they take the best and worst of their family.

Then, I read “Beast” by Samantha Hunt. This story was interesting, and I liked the idea of the secrets that the husband and wife are keeping are somehow making them transform into deer. The first thing that popped into my mind at the thought of deer in the midst of secrets would be the saying a deer caught in headlights. This quote stuck throughout the story for me because it seemed to be somewhat relevant to the plot. It seems to me that the reason that they turn to deer is because the both were eventually discovered in their secrets. It seems to illustrate how both the husband and the wife cheated, but yet found contentment and comfort with each other. The ending also seems to illustrate that they are planning on separating or giving each other time to be apart, and that this will allow them to reunite later on. The wife indicated that she would remember how many horns the husband had, but that it might not matter once they became animals. This seems to imply that they are aware that they might not come to be together after they were both discovered to be cheating, but that there could be a chance for them to find each other later in life.

Lastly, there was the story of “Fatso” by Etgar Keret. I found this one to be the most lighthearted, which was something I enjoyed. The premise of the story was how the girlfriend of a guy transformed into a fat man at night. At the beginning the man does not seem to believe his girlfriend, and is taken aback when he does see the fat man with the ring. However, the man learns to get along with his girlfriend during the day and the fat man during the night. Additionally, the man does not stop loving the girl after this revelations instead he loves her more and their relationship gets better. This seems to imply that the man learns new things of his girlfriend that to others may seem undesirable, but to him it is not because he loves his girlfriends. This story seems to show how even though a person can be different and not what is expected the person that truly loves them does not get deterred by the behaviors or visuals that seem to oneself or others as undesirable.

This week, we read four stories which all dealt with themes of transformation and shapeshifting. “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, “Mantis” by Julia Armfield, “Fatso” by Etgar Keret, and “Beast” by Samantha Hunt. While these stories share physical transformation as their main plot element, they are all distinct from one another in their underlying themes. 

I read “The Metamorphosis” as a metaphor for disability and the experience of becoming a burden on one’s family. Gregor tries to go to work despite his condition, but finds it is impossible, and his parents are forced to come out of retirement while his sister starts working at 17. While at first they try to accommodate him, the terror and resentment of Gregor’s family toward him grows, and they begin neglecting his needs, eventually leading to his death. After he dies, his family is relieved. They can finally mourn their son normally and move on with their lives. This is representative of the dynamic which can develop when the breadwinner of a family suddenly becomes disabled physically or mentally, or even enters a coma or vegetative state. Families can sometimes cease to view their loved ones as the same person that they were before (or even as human beings) when they can no longer recognize them.

“Mantis,” on the other hand, I read as a commentary on female adolescence. This story follows a young girl who goes to a Catholic girls’ school. She has a severe skin condition, which her mother tells her is genetic, passed down from her grandmother. She describes the experiences of herself and her friends, including insecurity, flaw competitions, and the introduction of boys into their lives, but it illustrates their closeness to each other as well. The narrator describes herself (and the other girls, to an extent) in a strikingly grotesque way, often going into detail about her peeling skin. She also goes into her relationship with her mother, who often retells the same story of her grandmother (a “party girl”) and seems to have a preoccupation with appearances, as she is repeatedly shown applying makeup to her seemingly uninterested daughter. In the end, the narrator completely sheds her skin to become an enormous praying mantis while at a party, and it is implied that she proceeds to eat the boy she was talking to. I think that her transformation may be a representation of the uncomfortable and rarely discussed aspects of growing up as a girl, such as hunger, anger, and lust. I also think it has something to do with the things we inherit from our mothers, such as generational trauma, vices, and even just personality traits.

“Fatso” is a very short story about a man whose girlfriend transforms every night into a fat man who enjoys soccer, eating and going out to bars. The narrator is at first slightly put off by this, but learns to like Fatso and finds harmony living with his girlfriend/wife during the day and hanging out with his friend Fatso at night. This story might have been about accepting the unexpected aspects of your partner’s personality, but I mostly found it humorous.

“Beast” is a story about secrets. It follows a woman who, despite her love for her husband, struggles with an insatiable lust for something more dangerous, intense, risky. Shortly after she cheats on her husband with a man who gives her that, she begins transforming into a deer every night after her husband falls asleep. She keeps this from him for days, but when she does eventually tell him, he reveals to her that night that he also transforms into a deer. They leave the house to find countless identical deer, and decide to join them even though it means losing some individuality. I read this as a metaphor for shame. She was ashamed of the thoughts she had and of cheating on her husband, and that shame was represented by her turning into a deer only when he couldn’t see. When she told him about it, though, it turned out that he also turned into a deer, that he also had secrets he was ashamed of. And then they left the house, and it was revealed that there are thousands of deer, and that the things they kept secret out of shame were actually very common.

The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels include  Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, was also a literature professor and an ardent lepidopterist. In perhaps his most famous lecture, on Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” delivered while teaching at Cornell University, he states:

“Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.”

In the lecture, Nabokov also speculates as to precisely what kind of insect Gregor Samsa has become. A cockroach? (You can read the published version of the lecture here, and here you can view a thirty-minute film version created for public television. The late Christopher Plummer portrays Nabokov.

Here, for good measure, is the first page of Nabokov’s annotated copy of Kafka’s story (click on the image to see a larger copy):