Are novelists entitled to use real-life characters?
Novels claiming access to the minds of real people are everywhere, and some are very good. But I can't help feeling a vital line has been crossed
I was delighted to see Anthony Beevor and AS Byatt joining in an argument I have been pursuing for a decade or so, considering the contemporary pandemic of fiction making use of real people as viewpoint characters, whether they be long-dead, recently departed, or still alive.
This needs to be sharply distinguished from Tolstoy musing on (or through) General Kutuzov, or Dumas making a (splendid) villain of Richelieu, or even Shakespeare's Tudor propaganda. What is at work today is linked to a general erosion of the ethical value of privacy and a parallel emergence of a widespread sense of entitlement to look at – or to make use of – the lives of others.
I'm not arguing, as Jonathan Dee did years ago, that this is a problem because of any failure of imagination. These works can be ethically troubling but some are superbly imaginative. My own net is cast more widely: this trend in fiction reflects a change in the way we address each other and the world. And it is happening, for the most part, by stealth. Most people – until very recently – haven't even thought about this.
Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace … all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to – certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art – novelists are buying into it wholesale.
The examples are manifold. Consider Marilyn Monroe in Joyce Carol Oates's novel, Blonde, or Virginia Woolf, walked through her suicide and the writing of Mrs Dalloway in Michael Cunningham's The Hours. Don Delillo, using Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra and Jackie Gleason, J Edgar Hoover, and Frank Sinatra as characters in Underworld.
Here's the New York Times on Oates's, Blonde: 'If a novel can't deliver Monroe's beauty ... it can give us her interior world.' What has happened when a reviewer suggests that a novel gives us the true inner world of a real person? This is nonsense, and it is pervasive.
Novelists are both caught up in this trend and even making of it something of a cause. Listen to Bruce Duffy, author of The World As I Found It, a novel about Wittgenstein. This is from the Afterword: 'I was disgusted - no, outraged is the word - that to some, Wittgenstein's life was clearly considered off-limits
Disgust? Outrage? Surely this is the language of entitlement. Admitting of no possible alternative, no intrusion, no … loss. Do we want to forbid such writing? Of course not, but shouldn't we at least consider, be aware of, what we might be losing when these fictions and the worldview that underlies them become widespread?
What I'm suggesting is this: what we see in these fine works – and they are fine works – along with countless inferior ones, is a dramatically expanded perception of entitlement, and of eroded privacy, of a piece with other aspects of our time.
One of the ways, I've argued, that a writer can address this dilemma is through the literature of the fantastic. Fantasy is usually seen as escapist and that is most often meant as a criticism. The adolescent fantasies one sees everywhere are, for the most part, simply examples of fiction-as-distraction, no better or worse than in other genres.
But it is a mistake to assume that the form itself must therefore be inherently trivial. The patterns of myth, folklore, archetype, and narrative embedded in the genre can be immensely powerful. And there's another, very different, strength of the form that's less noted - and is at the heart of what I want to suggest here.
Fantasy can also be a way of dealing with history in fiction - one which avoids the trap of fictionalising real lives. Let me illustrate this approach with my own The Lions of Al-Rassan, a book with a major character modelled on Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid: the single most powerful figure in Spanish legend and history. It seemed to me that by inventing a setting and inventing a man based on El Cid but clearly not him, I would be declaring, without pretense and ab initio, that I did not know what that real man was like nine hundred years ago, how he related to his wife, his children, his friends, his enemies.
When we work with history, to a very great degree we are all guessing. But by using motifs of time and history in a fantasy setting we are acknowledging that this educated guesswork, invention, fantasy underlie our treatment of the past and its peoples - and we are not claiming a right to do with them as we will.
For me, that is a wonderfully liberating thing for any writer, an honest response to the ethical dilemma which has seeped – like a toxic substance, unnoticed – into fiction, even at the highest levels. Fantasy is more than an escape from the truths of the world and the past, it is an open acknowledgment that those truths are complex and morally difficult. It offers a different route to creating something which will resonate with readers, in a way which resists the erasure of privacy and autonomy which pervades our modern world.
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