Fantasy.

I don’t know how many of you know the game ‘Fantasy’. For those of you who don’t I’m about to ruin the fun of the game by explaining it. Basically, you play the game with someone who hasn’t played before and you tell them that you’re going to make up a story and they have to guess what that story is.. However, the catch is – there really is no story. You tell them that they are only allowed to ask yes or no questions in order to ‘figure out’ this story. The people who supposedly ‘made up’ the story answer ‘yes’ if their question ends in a vowel or ‘no’ if it ends in a consonant. For example, “is it set at Hamilton?” answer – no. After doing this for a few minutes, the person asking questions typically establishes plot, characters, setting etc. and can formulate a story based on their own imagination, personal experiences, and friends or family names. They create their own fantasy by trying to guess someone else’s story.

Even though I am pretty confused about Foe right now, what we talked about in class reminded me of this game. The story of Robison Crusoe was initially thought to be a true travelogue of incidents and many thought that he was a real person. Even though I know Coetzee knew what he was doing, from what I was told, Foe struck me as if someone was trying to ‘guess’ the story of Robinson Crusoe, but ended up with a similar plot with opposite details. (I haven’t read Robinson Crusoe). The ideas of a bed on the island in Foe and the desk and chair on the island in Robinson Crusoe and the literacy of Friday in the two stories shows a relationship between the two texts but makes me question whether the story told in Foe is considered a lie because it contradicts Robinson Crusoe or if it’s just another fictional story?

The story within Foe that Susan Barton writes in her letters is also subject to suspicion as we aren’t sure of what she has created and what really is happening in her world. She tells her ‘daughter’ that she is ‘father-born’, and we discussed that this would only be possible within a story where she can construct things that fit into her ‘fantasy’ where she creates her own reality based on things she wants to happen and create people she wants to exist (Friday?). After today’s class I wonder whether the “lies (she) doesn’t want told about (her)” (Coetzee,40) are the lies that she is actually telling about herself and I question, just as she did (when talking to Cruso), “what (is)truth and what (is) fancy.”

Another idea that interested me was that what we saw in Grizzly Man and what we read in the story within Foe is sifted and selected by whoever recorded Susan’s letters (unknown) and by Hertzog. Hertzog chose which scenes he put into the documentary and ‘unknown’ decided which letters were collected and recorded for reading. Even though we know that they are leaving out pieces of information and events that might be essential for our perception and understanding of Treadwell’s, Susan and Friday’s lives we accept that because we are entertained and enjoy what we watch/read. However, I wonder what happened in the scenes that we did not see in Grizzly Man and the days that were not recorded in Foe.

Between Susan’s ambiguous ‘story telling’, and the way the letters are sifted and selected, I find it hard to decipher how much of Susan’s story is based on her events, how much is based on imagination, and how much has been cut out to shape a false perception of Susan’s life.