Golden Age Essay

At the point when the present life does not fulfill one's desires, when the current conditions appear to exacerbate to an ever increasing extent, it is normal to dream of another life and of a different universe that are not just 'other' than the present, but rather likewise and principal of perfection of the present. This 'other' and 'perfect' life is typically situated in an alternate time and additionally better place. As to time, the model of a happy and perfect life is usually projected to the primordial phase of human existence, the so called “Golden Age”, such an age that may be nostalgically recalled with and without the auspicious feeling of its rebirth. As to place, the same model is usually located in a distant, unknown or completely

We need to understand fantasy in at least two ways, the literary and the psychological. As discussed elsewhere, in literary terms “The fantastic is a quality of astonishment that we feel when the ground rules of a narrative world are suddenly made to turn about 180°” (Rabkin41). The fantastic does not arise simply out of the inclusion in a text of something not of our world. Stephen Daedalus, despite James Joyce’s memorable “portrait of the artist as a young man,” seems never to have existed. Yet that does not make Joyce’s book a fantasy.

Works that do this frequently and in many ways, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), works that repeatedly reverse the ground rules of the characters (Alice suddenly changes size), the plot (her tears make a pool in which she can swim), theme (is this about logic, language, or literature itself?), and style (“curiouser and curiouser”) are true fantasies. But so may be works with minimal reference to the possibilities of “the real world.” The literary fantastic arises from our engagement with a structure of sudden and fundamental reversal.