How Fiction Works (50-248)

I just finished How Fiction Works, and really enjoyed it from beginning to end. Admittedly, it is kind of an English teacher book, but I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in thinking about the relationship between life and art, or in reality and why it feels real, or in how we come to understand other people.

In his chapter about character, Wood takes on the traditional division of characters into round and flat -- traditionally, your major characters are round, fully fleshed out with pasts, inner lives, and development over the course of the novel, while minor characters are flat, having one fixed defining characteristic. Instead, Wood argues that we should think of characters on a spectrum from transparent to opaque. The author asks what it is that makes a character real. While Nineteenth century novels tended to focus on extremely detailed characters, with every aspect of their lives provided in detail, Wood points out that some of the most intriguing, believable characters are instead extremely sketchy, with little detail and no motives provided. (He gives lots of examples!) I was fascinated by the following situation from Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:

Ricardo Reis, a doctor from Brazil, is an aloof, conservative aesthete who has decided to return to his native Portugal. It is the end of 1935, and the great poet Fernando Pessoa has just died. Reis is himself a poet and mourns Pessoa's departure. He is not sure what to do. He has saved some money, and for a while he lives in a hotel, where he has an affair with a chambermaid. He writes several beautiful lyrics, and is visited by the now-ghostly Pessoa, with whom he converses. Samago describes these conversations in a frankly literal and direct manner [...]

But Ricardo Reis is not a "real" fictional character, whatever that means (like David Copperfield or Emma Bovary). He is one of the four pen names that the actual Pessoa [...] assumed, and in whose persona he wrote poetry. The special flicker of this book, the tint and the delicacy that make it seem hallucinatory, derive from the solidity with which Saramago invests a character who is fictional twice over [...] This enables Saramago to tease us with something that we already know, namely that Ricardo Reis is fictional. Saramago makes something deep and moving of this because Ricardo also feels himself to be somewhat fictional, at best a shadowy spectator, a man on the margins of things. And when Ricardo reflects thus, we feel a strange tenderness for him, aware of something that he does not know, that he is not real. (108-110)

I found this section fascinating and chilling. The idea of a character who does not know he does not exist appeals to me, but I was really drawn to the way in which we can believe in and sympathize with somebody we know does not exist. I imagine that after reading this novel, my emotional response to Ricardo would be undeniable -- I would care about him -- and, in that sense, he would be as real as any other character in a work of fiction. Finally, I found myself comparing myself with Ricardo. How real am I? How do I know I exist?

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Picador, 2009.