Homo Irrealis by André Aciman

Homo Irrealis
by André Aciman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

We often think about imagination as the opposite of true experience, which is to say we often neglect how much of our experience is colored and framed by what we imagine. What we see, hear, and feel when we encounter a person's face, a city, or a movie are shaped by what we remember and what we anticipate. The past and the future are in the present, or as William James put it, they belong to a single stream of consciousness. André Aciman's Homo Irrealis is a collection of essays that explores the imaginative character of experience and the complicated relationship between what we regard as real and what we regard as imaginary.

The collection begins with Aciman recalling his boyhood in Alexandria, noting how his memories of the city cannot be disentangled from his memory of wanting to be elsewhere. He likens the paradox of knowing he was once there, while at the same time knowing he wasn't truly there, to remembering the final days of a failing romance. In a similar manner, each essay delves into Aciman's relationship with, say, a poem, a city, a film, a photograph, or an author, and shows how each relationship is mediated, filtered, selective, and indirect. To use one of his examples, consider arriving late for a movie at the cinema. Not knowing how much of the movie has passed, we might console ourselves by deciding that we will return later for a second viewing. The negative feeling is consequently remedied by placing the experience within a different frame:

The sudden disappointment of missing the beginning distracts me and gives the entire viewing an unreal, provisional feel, as though seeing the film now doesn’t really count, because it might need to be corrected by a second viewing. I like the option of a second viewing that is already implied in the first, the way I like to see places or hear tales told a second and a third time while I’m still experiencing them the first time—which is how I confront almost everything in life: as a dry run for the real thing to come.

On several occasions, we notice the possible switch between the object of our attention and whatever mediates our attention toward that object. Looking at a photograph can, at first, be a bridge to our childhood memories, but then our memories become the bridge, the connective tissue, that guides our inspection of the photograph. Going through a series of such switches, Aciman, among other things, looks at Rome through Freud, while also seeing Freud through Rome. His visits to Rome, seen through Freud's visits, are mapped onto the multi-layered, cross-generational buildings, with ruins of their past beneath the recently added layers, and the architecture soon becomes a model of the human mind and our relationship with time. Similarly, Eric Rohmer and W. G. Sebald mediate the explorations of lost romantic opportunities and, in general, the theme of the misspent life, while at the same time, Aciman's nostalgic-at-all-costs attitude informs his reflections on Rohmer and Sebald.

One can imagine a scenario in which Homo Irrealis causes only frustration in the reader. Rather than searching for clarity, Aciman embraces the haziness and ambiguity of what is in view. Regarding each memory, each work of art, each impression as a reflection of his own mind can seem like an insistence on solipsism. One might feel dissatisfied with the passivity that his style of writing seems to reinforce, a type of passivity that resembles the celebration of a sophomoric existential angst. The sense of helplessness against the facts of life, the expression of which in such flowery language appears self-indulgent. Is there anything else to do other than striving for the best and most beautiful expression of an (irreal) melancholy? At one point, while telling us about a pleasant, though dispassionate, meeting with a former lover, Aciman writes:

I wanted my younger self to be present at this reunion and, having sat him down with us in the small café, to tell him that this moment here, between two ex-lovers who were happy to be together for a few hours and didn’t quite know if this was really now or then, was possibly the very best that life had to offer.

Upon reading this passage, some of us might find the impulse to respond: There are, obviously, far better things in life than running into your ex-lover and then going for coffee!

Isn't there a strange parallel between running into a former lover and the second viewing of a film, both of which are presented as optimal standpoints—distant and detached. Of course, this might be an uncharitable reading. The standpoint adopted by Aciman in these essays isn't passive per se. It is a standpoint necessary for deliberation. Without the pause of temporary inaction, deliberation is impossible. The same pause enables us to detect our acts of imagination and the possibility of imagining differently. The same standpoint that enables noticing one's own mind reflected back in a work of art might enable us to see differently, trying to see the work of art as an entity outside our mind. Perhaps what Homo Irrealis offers us is not a passive and detached perspective for its own sake, but a detachment we could use in discovering ways of imagining and acting. The irrealis mood, rather than suspending reality, could enrich and deepen our sense of reality.

—Davood Gozli is assistant professor of psychology at University of Macau.