'To Live, for a Little Time, Another Life'

“We, whatever our current station on the span of three-score-and-ten, are ephemeral. Only make-believe people can endure for long; and some, like Hamlet, are permanent – at least until the sun burns out.” 

A young woman tells me she loves George Eliot but hadn’t, until recently, read her final novel, Daniel Deronda. She was moved to do so by an old post of mine, which means I’ve been doing something right. The novels of the nineteenth century spoiled us and raised our expectations for what fiction can do, which is why so many recent novels are disappointments. I find the title character’s gradual realization of his Jewishness in Eliot’s novel enormously moving. Deronda is my template or model for discovering one’s previously unknown identity and, in a sense, for religious conversion. He had been attracted to Jews and Judaism without knowing why. Deronda’s story is “real” to me and more compelling than the lives of many people I’ve known in this dimension – the real world.

 

I have no interest in ontological dithering when it comes to fiction. I’m not embarrassed to admit that fictional characters can be real (this time, no quotation marks). Sophisticates may deny this but dedicated readers know better. Who would deny the reality of Ralph Touchette and Natasha Rostov? Humans love stories. What evolutionary advantage does this confer? Perhaps imaginative empathy, practice for the real thing. What do strangers do when they meet, assuming they’re not killing each other? Often, they swap stories. Characters are the delivery system for narratives.

 

Another example: My favorite among all of Joseph Epstein’s stories is “Kaplan’s Big Deal” (The Goldin Boys, 1991). “Kaplan was alone in the world,” he writes, “unconnected, responsible for himself only.” And that’s his problem, though he's unaware of it at the start of the story. He’s a forty-five-year-old Pontiac dealer, a lifelong Chicagoan, without a wife or kids but not on the make. He’s resigned but bored. He meets a French woman, Françoise Berger, and her son, Phillipe. Spontaneously, seemingly out of nowhere, Kaplan realizes he wishes to be a father, Philippe’s father.

 

I won’t give away anything further. I first read “Kaplan’s Big Deal” when it was  published in Commentary in 1989. Two years earlier the first of my three sons was born. To this day, when I think of being a parent, the father of boys, the pain and exhilaration, I remember Kaplan and the helplessly involuntary love he feels for Phillipe. Please read the story and look at a model of what it means to be a father. There’s no creepiness, no perverted motives, though the mother gives Kaplan copies of Death in Venice and Lolita as a sort of test.

 

The passage quoted at the top is from Cynthia Ozick’s brief essay “Imaginary People,” collected in Quarrel & Quandary (2000). She writes:

 

“Make-believe, with its uselessness and triviality, with all its falseness, is nevertheless frequently praised for telling the truth via lies. Such an observation seems plainly not to the point. History seeks truth; philosophy seeks truth. They may get at it far better than novels can. Novels are made for another purpose. They are made to allow us to live, for a little time, another life; a life different from the one we were ineluctably born into. Truth, if we can lay our hands on it, may or may not confer freedom. Make-believe always does.”