If you had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, who would you choose?
I’d resist the obvious answers here. Shakespeare gives me plenty of possibilities, but most of his characters have weeks I would rather not live through. Performing Macbeth I’d one thing; being him is another. Then again, it is just a week. I’d enjoy being Romeo in love! Movie heroes exist to jabt the sh1t thrown at them; there’d be no dodging that!
Charles Dickens feels more promising. And the more I think about what I would actually want from seven days inside somebody else’s life, the less interested I am in power, wealth or adventure. I’d want access to another person’s memory.
That takes me to David Copperfield. Not necessarily the young David being packed off to school (did that) or sent to work at Murdstone and Grinby’s, but the older David: the writer looking back, reconstructing the people and places that made him. It’s who obam today, so the sense of adebentire might be limited. More like putting on someone else’s slippers.
I have my diaries, letters, photographs and an absurdly large archive with which to recover my younger selves. David Copperfield has memory transformed into narrative. I would love a week inside his head to discover what Dickens understood about the strange process by which an ordinary room, a face, a phrase or a humiliation survives while whole years disappear.
And I’d want to meet the people: Betsey Trotwood, Mr Dick, Peggotty, Micawber, Uriah Heep. Above all, I’d like to discover whether they felt as vivid from inside David’s world as Dickens has made them from outside it.
There are more glamorous possibilities. I could borrow Prospero’s island for a week, wander around Gatsby’s parties with Nick Carraway, or finally become Leopold Bloom and experience Ulysses rather than repeatedly failing to get very far into it.
But I think I’d choose David Copperfield.
A week inside somebody else’s remembered life might teach me something about how to write my own.
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