Response to Tomasi

                                                Fantasy in "The Professor and the Siren"

            Tomasi dives into a world of myth and fantasy in his short story "The Professor and the

 Siren."  Much like Calvino, fantasy in Tomasi's fiction exists within his interest in Greek classicism.  The story opens with the narrator's brief account of an affair that has left him alone.  In his state of isolation and with a strong distaste for humanity, he meets Senator Rosario la Ciura--"the Great Humanist," (62).  Both the narrator and the Senator share a critical view of humanity; however, Tomasi's use of fantasy juxtaposes the lives of the two men.  The narrator's life is grounded in a dull reality while the Senator seems to possess an unworldly superiority due to his affair with a Siren that separates him from humanity.  He wishes to refrain from "being convinced that the sordid pleasures of you people have never been Rosario La Ciura’s" (68).  Additionally, he possess a superior outlook on death.  Condescendingly, he refers to the narrator as "you people": “always the same, you people, slaves to decay and putrescence, always with ears strained for the shuffling steps of Death (72)."  The Senator's relationship with the Siren allowed him to briefly experience immortality.  In contrasting the lives of the narrator and the Senator, Tomasi is actually contrasting present reality with a life of mythical and classical worth.  The Senator's death serves as the wend of an interest in the classics-- which is "slowly rotting away,"--therefore an end to the story's element of fantasy (84).