ABSTRACT
Every story is, to some extent, a fantasy. Even if your own fiction is based very closely on real events, it has been filtered through your own distinctive mentality. In an essay about Kafka, whose work we discuss in this chapter, the Russian-born writer Nabokov imagines three individuals walking through a landscape. One is from a city, on holiday; one is a botanist; and one is a local farmer. The first will see some picturesque greenery and a road leading to a restaurant. The second is able to look much more closely at nature: ‘to him the world of the stolid tourist (who cannot distinguish an oak from an elm) seems a fantastic, vague, dreamy, never-never world’ (Nabokov 1980: 252). But the farmer’s perceptions outdo both these limited sets of responses, for
his world is intensely emotional and personal since he has been born and bred there, and knows every trail and individual tree, and every shadow from every tree across every trail, all in warm connection with his everyday work, and his childhood, and a thousand small things and patterns which the other two – the humdrum tourist and the botanical taxonomist – simply cannot know in the given place at the given time.
(Ibid.: 253)