Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet Page B

author wanted us to know about the character’s acts, words and, sometimes, thoughts. The rest doesn’t matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel’s characters are real. We may be free to imagine what we don’t know about them, though we know quite well that these are just guesses. And we are free to interpret their words or their silences, but again these will just be interpretations. We knowquite a lot about Odysseus, Aeneas or Don Quixote, correspondingly little about Homer, Virgil or Cervantes. Sometimes characters are even deprived of an author as if their creator had discreetly slipped away. Who made up the first version of Don Juan? Who invented Faust? And while we feel sure that Harpagon, Tartuffe or Monsieur Jourdain undeniably exist, what do we know in the end about a certain Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, whose stage name was Molière? Not very much, not even whether he really wrote all the plays attributed to him. Pierre Louÿs devoted his final years to trying to establish that Molière’s plays were in fact written by Corneille—which is not as far-fetched as it might at first appear according to Goujon and Lefrère. Hamlet is a great deal more present to us than Shakespeare, about whom we have only a few scraps of information. Without even going into the question of whether he wrote the plays, no traces remain (apart from his recorded marriage to Anne Hathaway and the births of the children, Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet) of his activity during his early manhood, 1579 to 1588, the period Shakespeare scholars call “the lost years.” So we shouldn’t assume too much.
    It’s even worse, in fact, when we think we
do
know the author. And this despite our knowledge that we know little or nothing even about our contemporaries. Every day one learns with surprise from the newspapers that, for instance, a certain notoriously homophobic conservative member of parliament has been arrested for soliciting in the men’s lavatories of an airport, or that a prominent advertising man has been accused by his daughtersof sexual abuse, that the helpful neighbor was really a dangerous psychopath, that the women’s downhill ski champion turned out to be a man, or that a respectable accountant was actually embezzling thousands to finance his addiction to the gaming tables. And yet we carry on believing what we read in biographies. (Curiosity is too strong: I have masses of biographies in my library!) They are simply im-aginary reconstructions based on the necessarily fragmentary elements left by someone now dead, whether long ago or in the recent past. And as for autobiography, it is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.
    We may be lacking many elements in the life of Henri Beyle, but the features Stendhal gave his fictional alter ego, Henry Brulard, are undeniable. Whole chunks of the life of Benjamin Constant are lost to us forever, but his
Adolphe
is sufficiently realistic to have tempted at least four writers to set out to write the novel from Ellénore’s point of view: Gustave Planche,
Essai sur Adolphe
(Essay on Adolphe) of 1843; Sophie Gay,
Ellénore
, of 1844; Stanislas d’Otremont,
La Polonaise
(The Polish woman) of 1957; Eve Gonin,
Le Point de vue d’Ellénore
(Ellénore’s point of view) of 1981. This is because literary figures are so real that writers borrow them from each other as they navigate from one book to the next (there are countless Don Juans and Wandering Jews). They can even come unexpectedly to life. Apparently Balzac on his death-bed called for Horace Bianchon, his fictional doctor in
La Comédie Humaine
. (“Yes, that’s it! Bianchon’s the man I need! If only Bianchon were here, he’d save me!”) The story is probably quite untrue, but it doessuggest that in the moment of dying Balzac was aware that his characters would survive his death.
    We are so anxious to maintain the illusion