A novelist and his character walk into a bar…
In classrooms and cafes, at book clubs and in essays, people discuss literary characters with as much passion as they discuss their neighbors or politicians. Readers feel anger, exasperation, joy, and grief over the likes of Prince Hamlet, Emma Bovary, Jay Gatsby, or Holden Caulfield. It seems absurd to spend so much psychic energy on people who are not real.
But maybe what’s absurd is the idea that things are neatly divisible into two categories, real and not real, life belonging to the first category and fictional literature to the second.
Some years ago I was driving up a hilly street toward my home when I saw a baby stroller rolling toward me. I jammed on the brakes, leaped from the car, and caught the stroller — which turned out to be empty. On the sidewalk I saw an embarrassed mother holding a baby in her arms, and I pushed the stroller over to her.
A couple of years later I started writing a novel about a joyful but ill-fated love relationship, and I used that runaway stroller incident as the opening scene. The married couple was trying to get pregnant, and Michael, the husband, sees catching the stroller as symbolic of his coming fatherhood. It seemed a good scene with which to start the story.
The novel, Love: A Story, took five years to complete, going through four major drafts and innumerable minor ones. It was finished in 2017, sold in 2018, and published a few weeks ago. The opening scene was revised dozens of times, and in it the character of Michael makes a joke to the mother about the Odessa Steps montage in the classic film Potemkin. Did I really say this to the mother that afternoon a decade ago, or did I make it up for the scene? I honestly do not know. In fact, I can no longer distinguish in my mind the real scene from the fictional version. When I try visualize that afternoon, I see the character of Michael, not myself, catching the stroller.
This hazy memory is consistent with current neuroscience, which now understands that memory is less like a video recorder in which we can press a replay button and more like a story teller residing in our minds. As in the game of “telephone,” our memories morph.
I have said that the incident with the runaway stroller was real. But it may not be so simple. First, my written description of the incident is not the same as the incident itself. A stone on the ground is not the same as the word stone. In addition, the scene was experienced by me, a human, and it bears that stamp. A passing dog or a being from a distant galaxy would have experienced it through a different lens. So we have the scene as it objectively was (what Kant called the “noumenal”), which we can never access, and the scene as it appears to humans (Kant’s “phenomenal”). We are now at four realities and counting.
Further, the incident of the stroller happened in time, as all things do. As soon as I rolled the stroller onto the sidewalk and drove away, the incident receded into the past, sliding from being real to having been real. The temporal nature of reality makes it like beam of light one can see but not catch. This is why Descartes’ famous proof, “I think, therefore I am,” is fallacious. He should have said, “I think, therefore something just was, but whatever it was is no longer the same as the mind that is thinking it.” What a world!
Likewise, my experience of the stroller incident while it was happening was one thing; my memory, morphing and fading over time, is another. In this way, the scene in the novel may be more enduringly real since it resides permanently on the page. Of course, the page becomes real, or real in a different way, each time it is read, and no two readers will read it exactly the same. So the realities of the rolling stroller are multiple.
My novel is narrated by a third-person voice who engages in philosophic musings on the action, tells bits of history, and thinks aloud about the characters. The narrator sometimes inhabits the minds of the two main characters, most often Michael’s. Near the end of the book, Michael, for whom things have not gone well, decides he will seek catharsis by writing a novel, and that the opening scene of this novel will be the incident of the runaway stroller. Readers realize that the novel they hold is thus the one that Michael wrote. So within the text itself we have four more appeals to reality: the author, the narrator, the characters, and the novel written by one of those characters and which contains that character and all the others. Pick your own metaphor for the metaphysics of this novel: Chinese boxes, a snake swallowing itself by the tail, that Escher drawing in which two hands emerge from the paper on which they are drawing themselves, a prism refracting a world into multiple realities. Is not the mind also like this, composing its own story from multiple kinds of reality?
To return to our original conundrum of why we care about unreal literary worlds and the non-existing characters who inhabit them, the answer is surely multi-faceted. Plots have suspense, the characters are interesting, and we see in ourselves and others aspects of Hamlet, Holden, or Jay Gatsby. But the foundation of these reasons is simply that fictional stories and real life experiences are ultimately made of the same stuff: consciousness. The mind is the soil in which they grow. Hamlet’s inner turmoil, Holden’s fear that he’s disappearing, and Gatsby’s elusive green light at the end of the dock reside in our consciousness with the same weight as a stone: known and felt.
