Fiction vs. real life

Donna Leon

Late in her novel The Temptation of Forgiveness, Donna Leon gives us an interesting conversation between Commissario Guido Brunetti and his wife, Paola, about fiction versus real life.

"In most novels, things get explained to them (readers) by a narrator," Paola says. "They get told why people did what they did. We're accustomed to that voice, telling us what to think." Later she adds, "Life doesn't have a narrator — it's full of lies and half-truths — so we never know anything for sure, not really. I like that."

Her husband's main contribution to the conversation are the words, "So fiction really is fiction?"

This conversation is a bit ironic for two reasons: 1) It takes place in a novel, a work of fiction. 2) Throughout the course of the novel, Brunetti reads Antigone, a play by Sophocles based on a Greek myth, and thus a work of fiction. His thoughts about the play and the ethical issues involved help guide his thoughts about the case he is working on.

Paola's words about fiction as opposed to real life remind me of something C.S. Lewis wrote on the same subject. Lewis argued that the more realistic stories pretend to be, especially stories written for children, the less realistic they prove to be. Speaking about his own experience as a child, he wrote, "The fantasies did not deceive me; the school stories did." That is, the stories supposedly showing real boys and girls in real situations were always misleading, because as Paola suggests, real life doesn't work that way. They raised, Lewis says, "false expectations." When reading fantasy, all readers (including children) know it's fantasy.

It was no accident that Lewis's own fiction consisted mainly of fantasy, such as his Narnia stories, and science fiction. The farther a story is from reality, he seemed to believe, the more authentic it can be in speaking to us about our own lives. Sort of like Antigone.