11/08/2025
A fictional character is not a real person, yes?
But fictional characters are often (heavily) based on real people. (And there is also autofiction: a fictional character based on the self.)
However a real person can be a fiction in your head. For example: Murray Bail is, has always been, a figure in my head, a fiction of who he is [though he is a real person] - in that I may have met him, but I don't know him well, and in fandom, or as a subject of my research, that real person becomes a fiction.
I've heard that people have cried over Little Dorrit's death (Charles Dickens), and , indeed, I cried for the family whose son died but the baker who baked his birthday cake kept enquiring about the bill because he didn't know of the son's death, in Raymond Carver's short story 'A small, good thing' ... as if these characters were real people.
Harriet Chandler supposedly first appeared (on earth) in Murray Bail's Holden's Performance. But then I wrote her back and forward story:
"Joy and Bart Chandler named their daughter for Beecher Stowe’s
stance against the
po*******hy of slavery, and for Backer, the Norwegian impressionist. They liked the way in Backer’s painting, Blue Interior, the young woman’s foot twisted back underneath the hem of her full-length dress as she sat absorbed
meditatively in her sewing in the light of a window, and the way the room contained a large pot plant, a vase and a painting of a boat. Not long after Backer died, Harriet was born.
Bart Chandler read paleontology, archaeology, biology, history and politics. He was pleased with his daughter’s naming.
He learned that a Galapagos tortoise brought to Australia
by Darwin had hit the century mark and gone further. The
tortoise, called Harry, had a mistaken gender ascription and was renamed Harriet. Longevity and a capacity for coevolution, Bart Chandler decided, had been successfully conferred on his
daughter.
Much later Harriet would speculate that in some failed
anagram her name may have come from a combination of ...
Hurtle and Courtney and Rhoda and Duffield."
Even Harriet Chandler herself could not easily think of herself as real!: "Over a period, seeing her work on display, she inspected it herself. It was strange to see her name on things. She didn’t recognise the person stepping out from behind the grouping of
symbols. ‘What’s that woman like?’ she thought. ‘Who stands behind that name? Who bears the mantle 'Harriet Chandler'?"
