The Virtual vs. the Real
REICH, TOVA
The Virtual vs. the Real The Secret By Eva Hoffman Public Affairs. 265 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara, "Master of the Return," "The Jewish War" Admirers of Eva Hoffman's...
...Therefore she should not exist...
...a TV or entertainment center, for example, reincarnates as a "Data Dispenser...
...His recognitions triggered me into specificity...
...Throughout, references to her include sentences with almost every word capitalized to highlight her significance to the narrator-a signature device employed by Hoffman in Lost in Transìation, though less liberally...
...Iris tells us, "I kept finding I had something like-a personality...
...From this pulsing core, it radiates naturally outward to abstractions and acquired wisdom related to foreignness, identity and so on...
...Lost in Translation succeeds so admirably because it emanates from the genuine urgency of the Polish-Jewish girl's story, and relies on all the richness and detail that attaches to her alone...
...Under Robert's gaze...
...Iris describes herself as "a microchip off the old motherboard" and hers is a tale of "my mother, myself"-with a vengeance...
...The disembodied voice of the Adviser, a kind of 21 st-century shrink upgrade, at various points offers interpretations very much in the traditional psychoanalytic mode-separation anxiety, transference, projection, acting out, oedipal rivalry, etc...
...Finally, she becomes intimate with Robert, a "Consciousness Origins" devotee, and finds that her lifelong torment of the Weirdness vanishes entirely...
...Ewa's renaissance involves internalizing an adopted language and culture as she becomes Eva Hoffman...
...Copying oneself is an act of extreme narcissism...
...Iris' need to sever her abnormal maternal attachment is also manifested by her taking on a series of lovers...
...From that starting point, it strains to achieve animation through basically generic detail and figures who could be composites from the "Character Catalogue" used by a novelist lover of the protagonist...
...it is a little like writing a book...
...Two objects cannot occupy the same space...
...It is definitely not good to be a clone in Hoffman's world...
...The overarching sci-fi theme is the virtual versus the real, which applies to Iris, who describes herself as "a nearly imaginary being, born into a reality so aberrant as to have no rules...
...But by the end she grudgingly concedes him some points...
...It is carried out from the clone's point of view, and the conclusion is that the fate of a man-made person is a miserable one...
...After the cathartic attempt to strangle her creator, she moves into a brief but profoundly significant "transgressive" relationship with Steven, an archeologist and Elizabeth's former boyfriend...
...Because you have made me, you must know: You are counterfeit...
...At least that revenge is mine...
...What is odd, though, is that even after the Adviser clearly has been informed by Iris that she is a clone, he continues to treat her like an ordinary human neurotic...
...There is something fundamentally wrong with "All that mucking around with life, with creation...
...This conviction is articulated by Iris' Aunt Janey, the model of normality and decency, and it therefore bears the stamp of common sense, of intuitive truth...
...Helpme,please.'" The revelation launches Iris on a quest for separation from her mother that will ultimately bring her to recognize the authenticity of her living self...
...Still, probably the level on which The Secret makes the most sense is as a fictional examination of an intellectual concern: the danger of scientific hubris and, more specifically, genetic engineering...
...Another epiphany occurs following the death of her grandmother in Palm Beach, when Iris boards a plane to Chicago overcome by the desire to murder her mother: "As long as She existed, my reality-my meaningwas abolished...
...Soon after she learns the truth, Iris runs off in the night to New York to connect with family-Janey, her mother's sister and genetically also her own, and her aged grandparents/parents...
...Iris generally scoffs at his pronouncements...
...The story unfolds in a series of epiphanies recounted by Iris, the first and most well-rendered being her discovery at 17 of "the secret" her mother was withholding (but most attentive readers probably divined from the opening pages): that she is Elizabeth's clone...
...A late, nearly virtual reality...
...Of course, in subject the two works are more different than alike, and it might seem excessive to dwell on the comparison...
...The Secret, on the other hand, is somewhat artificially conceived...
...That brings us to a critical question: Will this clone live...
...And that is worth noting, if only to help illuminate why the true memoir comes to life with such vibrant immediacy while the fictional one, like the clone at its center, is never quite persuasive as a living entity...
...One transformative insight strikes her on Seventh Avenue in the wake of fantasizing about standing on the hood of a car, shooting down the passing crowd...
...Its thrust comes from one sweeping conceit: the human consequences of genetic manipulation...
...Initially these are casual, affectless affairs with strangers where she essentially throws herself away...
...It is a work of science fiction, though it might more accurately be called science fiction lite, since it takes technological innovations already imagined or extant and gently tweaks them to fit a slightly advanced age...
...Often the author simply changes a name into a more futuristic one...
...I was getting a homeopathic dose of...
...She thinks of the passers by: "I don't need to kill you, my very existence makes the less of you...
...they are predictable, simplistic and reductive...
...I mean, Really Live...
...Yet the similarities, not only in the basic trajectory but also in the analytic, sophisticated and self-absorbed narrative voice, are striking...
...Iris' self-realization comes via love and acceptance...
...Each book begins with an almost perfectly idyllic childhood marred only by intimations of troubling origins...
...For the nonfictional Ewa Wydra, growing up in the Krakow of the late 1940s and '50s, the unease lies in her knowledge that she comes "from the War...
...From which point I originated...
...Her "creatrix" is Elizabeth Surrey, recognizable from our own day as more or less your standard high-powered career woman, whose biological clock has ticked out...
...The anguish and fury evoked by the confirmation of this fact, like the outrage of finding oneself trapped in a fatal disease caused by someone else, comes across with considerable force, particularly in the scene where Iris confronts her mother: "'Help,' I whispered, not knowing suddenly where I was, from which point, which one of us my voice originated...
...Also engaged are motifs of doubling and mirroring explored most memorably by writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Nabokov, with an extra nod to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharerborrowed here as the name of a clone activist group Iris briefly joins...
...Both lives are radically disrupted in adolescence-Ewa's by immigration to Vancouver, Iris' by the definitive uncovering of her roots...
...As the astute literary intelligence behind Lost in Translation could no doubt explicate better than anyone, The Secret can be read on several levels...
...ordinary, non-weird Being, of being unquestionably who I was...
...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara, "Master of the Return," "The Jewish War" Admirers of Eva Hoffman's acclaimed memoir, Lost in Translation, will be interested to learn that The Secret, her fiction debut, also takes the form of a memoir-in this case, of a human clone...
...Elizabeth, Iris says, "Had to Change Her Life...
...And then she had the Idea, and the Idea was me...
...It is as if he had diagnosed her as aperson who, for a variety of complex reasons, only feels like a clone...
...Furthermore, the novel takes on a psychological dimension...
...For the novel's Iris Surrey, living in a small town outside Chicago sometime in the near future (around 2025), the worry is about her biological provenance-a gnawing intuition she calls "the Weirdness...
...In different ways these traumas cast the young women into emotional as well as physical exile, and a sense of unreality persists until their strengthened identities emerge in adulthood...
...Given his presumed authority, this strange therapeutic approach shunts the narrative into a metaphorical sphere...
...The fantastical element slides easily onto the literary level as the book invokes such archetypes as Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein's monster and the Golem...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
