Do you recognize those words? I'd be surprised if you do. They come from Kill Bill Volume 2, the film by Quentin Tarantino, and they are spoken by the titular character Bill. He's speaking to the protagonist Beatrix, played by Uma Thurman. He resolves the dilemma by firing a dart with a truth serum into her leg.
We are to understand that Beatrix and Bill have a very extensive and chequered backstory. The scene crackles with dramatic fictional. I seem to remember being struck, even when I saw it in the cinema (all the way back in 2003), by how palpable that backstory felt when, after all, these are made-up people who never really existed.
I've always loved backstory, whether it's fictional or real. I'm immensely excited by phrases such as these:
"We've known each other a long time..."
"That really takes me back..."
"When I think of all the times that we used to..."
Well, you get the picture.
I'm forty-seven years of age. I've probably passed the halfway-mark of my life (and, of course, I could die tomorrow-- or tonight!). I'm exactly at the age that Shakespeare retired.
My past doesn't seem at all extensive to me. It's never taken on the aspect of "blue remembered hills", of a shimmering horizon on the edge of vision. This is what I imagined when I heard grown-ups talking about the past, in my childhood. That's what excited my sense of wonder.
Is this because my life has been relatively uneventful? I don't know. But somehow, I don't think another ten, twenty, or forty years-- or any amount of adventures-- would make any difference to this sensation, or lack of a sensation.
The funny thing is, insofar as I do have that sense of a shimmering horizon, I had it when I was in my late teens. I wonder if other people have this experience?
For instance, I can remember reflecting on a line from a Keats sonnet in my diary, when I was seventeen. The line is Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, from the sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." I wrote something like this: "It will be a sad day if this line ever ceases to fill me with wonder".
How long had I known the line? Well, I discovered poetry around the age of fourteen, so it could only be three or four years. But it already seemed like something that I had known forever. And I can think of many similar examples.
I think there's a particular sense of antiquity to things that happened (either in the wider world or one's own environment) just before you came along. The seventies have a strange aura of timelessness in my mind, even though few people who lived through them seem to have experienced them like that.
Anyway, it's quite distressing to not experience that sense of a shimmering horizon behind you. It makes life seem very short, casual, and somehow tinny-- "like the fly of a summer's day", as Burke puts it.
So I find myself more drawn to fictional backstory. "We'll always have Paris" (from Casablanca, need I say?) seems more solid than anything in my own experience, perhaps because it's been seen and quoted and referenced so often. In the film, it only actually occurred a year previously.
Television and cinema have all sorts of visual conventions to signify "long ago". They're listed here on TV Tropes. The most popular are probably dissolves and filters. I've often wondered how much they've contributed to our own sense of the past, of the backwards glance.
Those are the differences between fictional and real backstory. However, it was a similarity that led to this post-- specifically, one that occurred to me when I found myself remembering the scene from Kill Bill.
This is the similarity. In a sense, fictional and real backstories are equally non-existent. The past has no physical reality. You can't touch it or visit it. So, when a fictional character invokes an imaginary past, in a certain sense it's just as real or unreal as my childhood, or yours.
And that brings us to the similarity between me and you and fictional characters. Since I've first read it, I've felt that Prospero's speech in The Tempest describes a very profound reality. We are such things as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. In many ways we are as fleeting and insubstantial as fictional characters-- we are contingent, creaturely, unnecessary.
I can't explain why, but this thought is the opposite of depressing to me. That doesn't make much sense, given that the lack of a shimmering backward horizon oppresses me.
In any case, backstory has always seemed magical to me, and I think I've come to a better appreciation of why it seems magical.
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